A recent report from The Information maintains Meta has started outsourcing some design for upcoming headsets amid a shift to move part of its production out of China. Now, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth refutes those specific design claims, saying headsets will continue to be designed “in house.”

According to The Information (non-paywalled via SeekingAlpha) Meta is reportedly planning to move half of its Quest headset manufacturing from China to Vietnam, a step done to avoid upcoming steep import tariffs soon to be levied on that country by US President-elect Donald Trump.

Goertek Vietnam | Image courtesy Vietnam Investment Review

The report additionally alleges Meta is set to shift more of its component design, including lenses and displays, to Goertek, the Chinese original design manufacture (ODM) known for creating both reference designs and manufacturing devices for companies across the XR industry.

Furthermore, Meta has reportedly tapped Goertek and other manufacturers to eventually develop its headsets by 2030, as the company is said to transition to focus more on its lucrative software business. Such a joint design manufacturing relationship would allegedly include Meta outlining goals to Goertek, which then proposes multiple options for Meta to choose from.

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Andrew Bosworth, Meta CTO and head of the company’s XR-focused Reality Labs, has however refuted those specific design claims in a recent X post.

“[S]omeone is pushing the design rumor hard to multiple outlets, and that aspect remains false,” Bosworth says. “We continue to design our headsets in house as we have and have no plans to change that. We always partner with our manufacturers to some degree but nothing material is changing there.”

In a follow-up post, Bosworth underlines its work with Goertek will be business as usual.

“To be clear, Goertek is a great partner and as parts of our stack are more mature and used from headset to headset we’re glad to have them carry the designs across which has always been true. But this isn’t a change from how we’ve done business with them even as we scale it up.”

Citing a Meta employee, The Information additionally reports Goertek has begun designing the outer shell for future versions of Meta’s MR headsets, and is now playing a larger role in R&D for other Meta products, including its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

Earlier this year Goertek injected $280 million into its Vietnamese subsidiary, which according to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange filing is said to specialize in manufacturing consumer electronics products, such as headphones, smartwatches, and VR and AR devices.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • wheeler

    Certainly wouldn't be a good look with the new administration and all, huh? Whatever the truth is, I can certainly see why they have Bosworth on PR Patrol.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    TL;DR: both statements are very likely to be true, as they aren't contradictions: Meta will continue to design Quest in house, while at the same time relying more on components designed by Goertek; this currently makes the most sense for economic reasons, which is why pretty much everyone is doing this already, and looming tariffs will reinforce this further; it's "XR business as usual."

    Whether the report is considered true or false will mostly depend on the definition of "in house design". It's certainly true that Meta designs the Quest headsets itself, but they don't start from scratch. Instead they mostly combine components created by other companies, sometimes designed in cooperation with Meta, and add their own software and Horizon OS, which again is based on the open source version of Android.

    One of the most important components is of course the SoC, which Qualcomm will provide for the foreseeable future, as Meta entered a strategic partnership with them after dropping their own ARM silicon project. Goertek has been Qualcomm's partner for creating feature packed (eye tracking, pancakes, depth sensors, hires display and passthrough, …) reference HMDs for years, and also manufactures most HMDs for Meta, Pico, HTC and others. So while Meta designs its own headsets, these designs will mostly end with some/many of the hardware features/components that the Qualcomm/Goertek reference design included. And which features exactly they adopt will depend a lot on the predicted cost for manufacturing the headset at Goertek. Unavoidably Goertek always has a significant impact on Meta's design, even if they don't design the Quest headsets directly.

    With VR hardware sales still rather low, it makes sense for most current VR headsets to be produced by Goertek to benefit from economies of scale, but the result is very similar designs. Meta does a lot of XR hardware research, but so does Goertek, who for example offered pancake modules long before Meta integrated their own designs into Quest Pro. In the early VR days the only available standard components were designed for smartphones. By now there are a couple of "standard" XR components (Apple Silicon SoC's in AVP, AMD APUs in Magic Leap and maybe Deckard, Qualcomm ARM in everything else), display panels from Samsung, LG etc., microOLEDs from Sony, BOE, SeeYa. Cameras come from Sony or others, and RAM, flash, sensors etc. are also readily available.

    It now rarely makes sense to create expensive custom XR hardware. So designing an HMD somewhat boils down to combining 3rd party components in accordance with what the ODM can manufacture for a certain price. Smaller companies will stick closer to the reference design and even use Qualcomm's Android and OpenXR stack to lower development costs. And with an urgent need to shift production out of China to avoid significant end user price increases in the very price sensitive (US) VR consumer market, there will be even more concentration. Since creating new manufacturing facilities plus the needed logistics and component infrastructure is rather expensive, there won't be many alternatives to Goertek Vietnam in the near future.

    So it is kind of likely that more and more of Meta's HMDs will consist of mostly standard components that Goertek provides for multiple companies, simply because this saves a lot of effort and money, with Meta focusing more on the software side. Meta has always been a software company and they care more about the platform than the hardware. Before VR they had only created some server designs for their data centers. Hardware design and production are different skill set that benefit from large(r than XR) scale production, so a shift could even be benefit the users.

    The overall design/selection of features will still happen at Meta, making both the report from "The Information" about Meta shifting to more components provided by Goertek, as well as Bosworth refuting this and stating that the design will stay in house, true at the same time. They are just looking at the problem from slightly different perspectives.

    And the opposite will be true as well: with HMDs becoming more standardized, the designs by Qualcomm/Goertek will incorporate more of the needs and experiences from customers like Meta or Pico. For example Meta developed some very low power neural chips to enable their photorealistic Codec avatars on mobile GPUs way too slow to render them directly at similar quality. And while Qualcomm has their own NPU designs integrated into the Hexagon DSPs, future XR2 SoCs may end up with parts designed by Meta. Possibly with similar time-limited exclusivity for Meta, similar to Meta getting the XR2 Gen 2 six months before anybody else. Where Bosworth is absolutely telling the truth is that Meta's "work with Goertek will be business as usual."

    • Dragon Marble

      The problem is with the false narrative of some kind of major strategy shift, and the implication that Meta is shifting away from VR. Meta is absolutely right in coming out with a strong denial. It's about narratives and perceptions, not about technicalities and definitions.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        What false narrative? And where did anybody imply that Meta is shifting away from VR? The report from "The Information" is mostly about relocating the production to Goertek Vietnam to avoid financial damage, with Meta deepening their existing relationship with Goertek to longterm "focus on the more profitable software business."

        Regarding the design it says that "Meta wants to shift more of the design of components such as lenses and displays to Goertek over time", which Bosworth doesn't contradict or even react to. His very short tweet doesn't clarify what "design rumor" exaxtly he is referring to, he just states that (so far) Meta designs headsets in house and (currently) has no plans to change it, leaving the door open to change this in the future.

        The report is in fact about a pretty normal evolution of the Meta-Goertek relationship and says nothing about a major strategy shift. Even the statement that Meta hopes that Goertek (and others) by 2030 will create full HMDs is just Meta's known HorizonOS 3rd party strategy like with the (nowhere to be seen) Asus and Lenovo headsets.

        Bosworth's tweet looks less like a strong denial and more like the CTO of the largest social network correcting the narrative by sending a "Don't panic" to the retweet-clickbait-without-checking crowd only reading headlines/(mis)interpretations, never bothering to read the actual source. Which, just like Bothworth, sees less drama and more "business as usual".

        • MeowMix

          You should probably see who Boz was replying to before making generalization about his push back. I get your point, but Boz was specific on his reply to a very specific person (who has a history of bashing Meta/Oculus and has bad blood with them).

          Of course, Goerktek is the choice of manufacturing vendor, and Meta has done partnerships with Samsung and Lenovo allowing design input (RiftS halo strap anyone ?). But the FUNDAMENTAL design CHOICES will still be done in house and signed off inhouse by Meta.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            I in fact went with the RoadToVR article apparently making the connection between report and tweet ("Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth refutes those specific design claims"), as I try to avoid the Musk-era X as much as possible. So there may be more background I'm not aware of, and Bosworth's tweet not even be directed at the report by "The information". Which would explain why I neither saw any contradiction between the two nor any drama.