Business 4 min read By Arthur Ellington
Snap Bets $3.5bn on AR Glasses for the Workplace
Snap has partnered with Nvidia, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce to push its new augmented-reality Specs into businesses, as the company's $3.5bn bet on AR hardware draws scepticism from an activist investor.
Snap is making its most ambitious push yet into augmented reality, announcing partnerships with Nvidia, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce to bring its new Specs glasses into workplaces. The move marks a significant escalation of the company's long-running effort to move beyond smartphone-centric computing and establish AR eyewear as a viable business tool.
The Snap Specs, priced at $2,195, are designed to operate as what chief executive Evan Spiegel describes as a computer rather than a pair of smart glasses for taking photographs. A large private display allows users to stream content, cast a screen, open a whiteboard or turn almost any location into a workspace, according to the company. Salesforce's Agentforce platform will be integrated into the glasses software, Nvidia will supply artificial intelligence capabilities to interpret visual environments, and Amazon will provide an AI assistant capable of responding to voice commands.
Spiegel said the partnerships are intended to make it straightforward for businesses to benefit from agentic platforms. He pointed to Snap's open-source extended-reality AI platform, which he said a number of businesses are already building on top of. The company has claimed a huge amount of interest in preorders for the new AR glasses, though it has not disclosed exact figures.
The push comes after nearly two decades in which the iPhone has accustomed consumers to a particular model of computing. Spiegel has argued that information can be displayed within a person's field of vision without requiring them to pull out a phone and look down at a screen, a shift he believes could herald a post-smartphone era.
It is not Snap's first attempt at glasses. The company recorded $39.9 million in Spectacles inventory-related charges in the third quarter of 2017 as it wrote down unsold stock from its first-generation camera glasses. Those earlier efforts did not pay off commercially. Spiegel maintains that the new Specs are different because their features make them desirable for business use.
The scale of the bet is considerable. Snap's current Specs programme has reportedly consumed more than $3.5 billion so far, a level of spending that has drawn pushback from activist investor Irenic Capital Management. The firm has argued that Specs should be funded on its own rather than from the wider business.
Such scepticism reflects the broader record of similar efforts elsewhere. Meta's Reality Labs division, which develops virtual, augmented and mixed-reality products, lost about $88.1 billion between 2019 and 2025, according to SEC filings. Over the same period the division generated only about $12.3 billion in revenue, equivalent to roughly $7.15 of operating loss for every $1 of revenue.
Google's experience with Google Glass offers another cautionary tale. The company released the products in 2014 at a price of $1,500, but pulled them from shelves the following year. Google subsequently retreated to enterprise customers, only for that second life to end as well: Glass Enterprise Edition was withdrawn in 2023, with support terminated months later.
For Snap, the workplace partnerships represent an attempt to avoid that fate by anchoring the hardware in enterprise software that businesses already use. Whether the strategy can justify the billions already spent — and satisfy investors pressing for discipline — remains the central question hanging over the company's AR ambitions.
