Humanoid robots are Meta's next 'AR-size bet'

During a recent trip to Meta HQ, I took the opportunity to ask one of the company's top execs about its new robotics effort.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth onstage at the 2025 Meta Connect conference. (Photo by Meta)

Building humanoid robots is Meta’s next “AR size bet,” a top executive told me recently. That suggests the company plans to spend billions of dollars on the effort.

During a recent conversation at Meta’s headquarters, CTO Andrew Bosworth said he stood up a robotics “research effort” earlier this year at the direction of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The team’s existence has been reported on before, but Bosworth hadn’t discussed its strategy in-depth until our interview.

“I don’t think the hardware is the hard part,” he told me ahead of Meta’s recent Connect conference. “I’m not saying the hardware isn’t also hard, but it’s not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the software.”

To demonstrate, Bosworth picked up my glass of water from a table between us.