According to reports, Meta is said to be laying off its custom chip team and strengthening its partnership with Qualcomm.

According to reports,Meta正在对其可穿戴设备的自制芯片团队进行裁员。

Reuters reports"Informed sources" said that yesterday Meta's internal communication platform Workplace informed the team's employees that the name of FAST (Facebook Agile Silicon Team) has not changed.

Before the layoffs, FAST had about 600 employees. Reuters said it could not determine the scale of the layoffs. We reached out to Meta, but the company declined to comment.

Meta has made multiple large-scale layoffs over the past year to cut costs, with Mark Zuckerberg calling 2023 a "highly productive year." The company laid off approximately 20,000 employees, including some from its AR/VR team and acquired VR game studios. Zuckerberg has said that these layoffs "may take until the end of the year to be completed," so the layoffs at FAST may be part of these broader layoffs.

Meta executives have previously publicly mentioned efforts to build homemade chips for its glasses and other future wearable devices. But few device companies have successfully weaned themselves off reliance on dedicated chip manufacturing companies, and only Apple has been able to do so while achieving equivalent or better performance.

"Information" reported last yearAccording to reports, the first Meta chip was supposed to be used in the new Ray-Ban smart glasses, which Connect announced last week. But executives ultimately chose to use Qualcomm's new AR1 Gen 1 chip because Meta's chip won't be released until 2024.

Earlier this year, The InformationIt was also reported thatQualcomm will also provide chips for the wireless computing devices of Meta's true AR glasses (scheduled for launch in 2027), and executives are even considering using Qualcomm chips in the glasses to process sensors.

The same report said the relationship between Meta and Qualcomm has grown stronger, with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and Mark Zuckerberg meeting "multiple times" a year.

More than a year ago, Meta and Qualcomm announced a "broad multi-year strategic agreement" to jointly build the Snapdragon XR chipset for the Quest headset, involving product and engineering teams from both parties working together. The first results of this collaboration appear to be reflected in the Quest 3, namely the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip.

The article was updated shortly after publication to add relevant information about layoffs throughout the year.