Last week Meta Platforms announced the layoff of 1,500 employees across its Reality Labs segment, including 331 positions in Washington state. According to a filing with the Washington Employment Security Department, the Redmond office was the hardest hit, followed by the Spring District facility in Bellevue. These cuts represent roughly 25% of Reality Labs’s workforce and signal a strategic retrenchment from the company’s ambitious hardware and metaverse development goals. Investors will be watching how these reductions affect product roadmaps for Quest VR headsets and the future of the Horizon Worlds social experience.

Data from Sensor Tower shows that in 2025, more than 50% of all ads on Instagram were served through Reels, up from 35% the prior year. In the U.S., Reels accounted for 46% of total time spent on the Instagram app, climbing from 37% in 2024, while on Facebook the short-form format reached 29% share. Although Reels currently monetizes at a lower rate than Instagram’s traditional feed, CEO Mark Zuckerberg reported that Reels’ annualized ad run-rate surpassed $50 billion in October. Analysts expect the continued shift of ad dollars toward vertical video to drive overall revenue growth even as monetization efficiency lags behind legacy formats.

Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan outlined on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” the company’s plan to invest roughly $600 billion over the next several years into AI infrastructure and U.S. job creation. Those funds will support the expansion of data centers optimized for large-scale machine learning workloads, development of Meta’s Llama language model, and deployment of custom AI chips. Meta forecasts capital expenditures of $70–$72 billion in 2025, with upward pressure expected in 2026 as the company pursues its goal of delivering personalized superintelligence to users. Investors will gauge whether such heavy spending can translate into sustained revenue upside through improved ad targeting and new AI-driven products.

According to Similarweb, Meta’s Threads app reached approximately 141.5 million daily mobile users by the end of 2025, overtaking Elon Musk’s X, which logged around 125 million. This milestone underscores Meta’s ability to leverage its broader social ecosystem and feature set to compete in the text-based microblog space. The growth of Threads may also bolster cross-platform engagement, offering advertisers new avenues for audience reach. Market participants will be monitoring whether Meta can sustain this momentum and convert mobile user gains into incremental ad revenue.