Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap Inc., speaks onstage during the Snap Partner Summit 2023 at Barker Hangar on April 19, 2023 in Santa Monica, California.
Joe Scarnici | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Snap on Tuesday announced the fifth generation of its Spectacles augmented reality glasses that can overlay digital graphics onto the physical world.
The latest Spectacles are only available for developers, who must commit to paying $99 a month for one full year if they want to build AR apps for the device. The glasses can produce more compelling digital visuals than the prior version and are built on top of a redesigned software operating system dubbed Snap OS.
Additionally, Snap is partnering with ChatGPT creator OpenAI to give developers tools that will allow them to build and port their artificial intelligence features for the smart glasses.
Snap’s announcement comes days before rival Meta’s Connect event, a conference where Facebook’s parent typically unveils its latest hardware. Like Meta, Snap has been trying for years to break into consumer hardware. Unlike Meta, Snap’s core online advertising business has been struggling.
Snap shares fell more than 20% after the company reported its latest quarterly results in August. Investors balked at weaker-than-expected guidance for the third quarter, and the company’s revenue for the second quarter trailed analysts’ expectations.
The previous day Meta reported better-than-expected quarterly results that sent the stock price up 7%. Still, Meta’s AR and VR bets continue to rack up losses — the company’s Reality Labs unit posted a $4.5 billion loss in the second quarter. That unit is responsible for the company’s Quest virtual reality devices and Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Since 2020, Meta has poured more than $63 billion in expenses into its hardware efforts. The company has yet to find meaningful success, but Wall Street has afforded Meta patience with Reality Labs because the company’s advertising business is thriving.
Meta brought in $131.9 billion in advertising sales for 2023, and reported net income of $39.1 billion for the year. By contrast, Snap recorded $4.6 billion in total revenue and a net loss of $1.3 billion in 2023.
“We are at a point where the challenge with Snap is that it is just functioning at a different scale than Meta,” said Leo Gebbie, a principal analyst and director at CCS Insight.
Fifth-generation Spectacles are pictured in a handout image, obtained by Reuters on September 12, 2024.
Snap | Via Reuters
With Meta selling its Quest VR headsets at a loss in order to lead and influence the overall VR market, Gebbie said he expects the company to follow a similar aggressive pricing strategy if it debuts its own AR device. For Snap to compete, the company’s AR device must be “something really impressive” that incorporates the best of its core Snapchat app and appeals to the younger demographic that differentiates it from Meta, he said.
Snap doesn’t break out financials for its hardware efforts as Meta does, but the company has struggled to find success selling hardware.
Snap debuted its first internet-connected Spectacles glasses in 2016, pitching the $130 devices as an easy way for users to capture short, first-person videos that they could post on Snapchat. A year later, Snap disclosed that it wrote down nearly $40 million due to losses from unsold Spectacles, underscoring the challenges it faces selling consumer hardware products.
Since then, the company has released other versions of its Spectacles smart glasses, including a version for $380 in 2019. In 2021, it sold a pair of glasses with AR capabilities in limited numbers to developers and creators instead of the general public, making the product more of a prototype requiring further improvement before a wider release.
Beyond glasses, Snap said in 2022 that it would stop developing its Pixy flying camera drone just months after it released the $230 gadget.
In getting out ahead of Meta with its latest AR glasses, Snap is using a strategy taken by the Facebook parent last summer when CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed details of the company’s Quest 3 VR headset a week before Apple announced its much-anticipated Vision Pro VR headset.
Much of Meta’s AR strategy involves sprinkling some AR features into its Quest-branded VR headsets while simultaneously pushing its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, made in partnership with EssilorLuxottica. The two companies on Tuesday announced that they had extended their partnership to continue developing smart glasses.
Although Meta doesn’t release sales figures, Zuckerberg has told analysts that its Ray-Ban Meta glasses that went on sale in October “continue to do well and are sold out in many styles and colors, so we’re working to make more and release additional styles as quickly as we can.”
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has centered the company’s hardware efforts around camera technology, which he believes is a natural fit with the core Snapchat app and its 850 million monthly active users.
It’s unclear how much longer investors will stomach Snap’s hardware push.
“We have seen the losses on Reality Labs grow quarter by quarter, and investors have indulged this because Meta is making enough profit from its advertising business,” Gebbie said. “Snap is hugely more constrained. It’s in a position where to meaningfully compete on hardware is going to be incredibly challenging.”
The lawsuit, filed by Musk’s AI startup xAI and its social network business X, alleges Apple and OpenAI have “colluded” to maintain monopolies in the smartphone and generative AI markets.
Musk’s xAI acquired X in March in an all-stock transaction.
It accuses Apple of deprioritizing so-called “super apps” and generative AI chatbot competitors, such as xAI’s Grok, in its App Store rankings, while favoring OpenAI by integrating its ChatGPT chatbot into Apple products.
“In a desperate bid to protect its smartphone monopoly, Apple has joined forces with the company that most benefits from inhibiting competition and innovation in AI: OpenAI, a monopolist in the market for generative AI chatbots,” according to the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
An OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement: “This latest filing is consistent with Mr. Musk’s ongoing pattern of harassment.”
Representatives from Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Tesla CEO launched xAI in 2023 in a bid to compete with OpenAI and other leading chatbot makers.
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Musk earlier this month threatened to sue Apple for “an unequivocal antitrust violation,” saying in a post on X that the company “is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store.”
After Musk threatened to sue Apple, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded: “This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.”
An Apple spokesperson previously said its App Store was designed to be “fair and free of bias,” and that the company features “thousands of apps” using a variety of signals.
Apple last year partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop and desktop products.
Several users replied to Musk’s post on X via its Community Notes feature saying that rival chatbot apps such as DeepSeek and Perplexity were ranked No. 1 on the App Store after Apple and OpenAI announced their partnership.
The lawsuit is the latest twist in an ongoing clash between Musk and Altman. Musk co-founded OpenAI alongside Altman in 2015, before leaving the startup in 2018 due to disagreements over OpenAI’s direction.
Musk sued OpenAI and Altman last year, accusing them of breach of contract by putting commercial interests ahead of its original mission to develop AI “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”
In a counter claim, OpenAI has alleged that Musk and xAI engaged in “harassment” through litigation, attacks on social media and in the press, and through a “sham bid” to buy the ChatGPT-maker for $97.4 billion designed to harm the company’s business relationships.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is seen on stage next to a small robot during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia announced Monday that its latest robotics chip module, the Jetson AGX Thor, is now on sale for $3,499 as a developer kit.
The company calls the chip a “robot brain.” The first kits ship next month, Nvidia said last week, and the chips will allow customers to create robots.
After a company uses the developer kit to prototype their robot, Nvidia will sell Thor T5000 modules that can be installed in production-ready robots. If a company needs more than 1,000 Thor chips, Nvidia will charge $2,999 per module.
CEO Jensen Huang has said robotics is the company’s largest growth opportunity outside of artificial intelligence, which has led to the Nvidia’s overall sales more than tripling in the past two years.
“We do not build robots, we do not build cars, but we enable the whole industry with our infrastructure computers and the associated software,” said Deepu Talla, Nvidia’s vice president of robotics and edge AI, on a call with reporters Friday.
The Jetson Thor chips are based on a Blackwell graphics processor, which is Nvidia’s current generation of technology used in its AI chips, as well as its chips for computer games.
Nvidia said that its Jetson Thor chips are 7.5 times faster than its previous generation. That allows them to run generative AI models, including large language models and visual models that can interpret the world around them, which is essential for humanoid robots, Nvidia said. The Jetson Thor chips are equipped with 128GB of memory, which is essential for big AI models.
Companies including Agility Robotics, Amazon, Meta and Boston Dynamics are using its Jetson chips, Nvidia said. Nvidia has also invested in robotics companies such as Field AI.
However, robotics remains a small business for Nvidia, accounting for about 1% of the company’s total revenue, despite the fact that it has launched several new robot chips since 2014. But it’s growing fast.
Nvidia recently combined its business units to group its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. That unit reported $567 million in quarterly sales in May, which represented a 72% increase on an annual basis.
The company said its Jetson Thor chips can be used for self-driving cars as well, especially from Chinese brands. Nvidia calls its car chips Drive AGX, and while they are similar to its robotics chips, they run an operating system called Drive OS that’s been tuned for automotive purposes.
Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan speaks at the company’s Annual Manufacturing Technology Conference in San Jose, California, U.S. April 29, 2025.
Laure Andrillon | Reuters
Intel on Monday warned of “adverse reactions” from investors, employees and others to the Trump administration taking a 10% stake in the company, in a filing citing risks involved with the deal.
A key concern area is international sales, with 76% of Intel’s revenue in its last fiscal year coming from outside the U.S., according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company had $53.1 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2024, down 2% from the year prior.
For Intel’s international customers, the company is now directly tied to President Donald Trump‘s ever-shifting tariff and trade policies.
“There could be adverse reactions, immediately or over time, from investors, employees, customers, suppliers, other business or commercial partners, foreign governments or competitors,” the company wrote in the filing. “There may also be litigation related to the transaction or otherwise and increased public or political scrutiny with respect to the Company.”
Intel also said that the potential for a changing political landscape in Washington could challenge or void the deal and create risks to current and future shareholders.
The deal, which was announced Friday, gives the Department of Commerce up to 433.3 million shares of the company, which is dilutive to existing shareholders. The purchase of shares is being funded largely by money already awarded to Intel under President Joe Biden‘s CHIPS Act.
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Intel has already received $2.2 billion from the program and is set for another $5.7 billion. A separate federal program awarded $3.2 billion, for a total of $11.1 billion, according to a release.
Trump called the agreement “a great Deal for America” and said the building of advanced chips “is fundamental to the future of our Nation.”
Shares of Intel rallied as momentum built toward a deal in August, with the stock up about 25%.
The agreement requires the government to vote with Intel’s board of directors. In the Monday filing, the company noted that the government stake “reduces the voting and other governance rights of stockholders and may limit potential future transactions that may be beneficial to stockholders.”
Furthermore, the company acknowledged in the filing that it has not completed an analysis of all “financial, tax and accounting implications.”
Intel’s tumultuous fiscal year 2024 included the exit of CEO Pat Gelsinger in December after a four-year tenure during which the stock price tanked and the company lost ground to rivals in the artificial intelligence boom.