this tech giant lost over $80 billion chasing the metaverse mark zuckerberg rebranded facebook to meta in 2021 for his vision of the next internet horizon worlds became the main vr social platform powered by quest headsets at its peak reality labs was burning billions yearly building immersive worlds and experiences this operation ran from huge server farms trying to connect people across the globe in a virtual universe low adoption massive losses and the ai boom led meta to pull the plug on the vr side the quest vr version of horizon worlds shuts down june 15 2026 moving fully to mobile