Snap is betting $3.5 billion on AR glasses that businesses can use as CEO Evan Spiegel sees a post-smartphone era
Fortune Joshua Hong ● Covered by 5 sources
Snap’s betting $3.5 billion on AR glasses for work, with new Specs and big partners. It’s a fresh shot at a face computer after years of misses.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Joshua Hong — read the original for the full story.
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Snap is making another expensive run at the idea that glasses can replace some phone habits, and this time it’s aimed at businesses. CEO Evan Spiegel unveiled a $2,195 pair of augmented-reality Specs in June and said they could help push computing into a post-smartphone era. His pitch is simple: stop looking down at a screen and let information sit in front of your eyes instead.
The company says there’s already strong demand, though Spiegel only went as far as calling preorder interest “huge” on Snap’s Q2 2026 earnings call. He did not give numbers. What Snap is selling now is also very different from its earlier glasses, which mostly flopped. The company took a $39.9 million inventory charge in Q3 2017 after writing down unsold first-generation camera glasses.
This version is being framed less as a toy and more as a work tool. Snap says the Specs can act like “a computer, not a pair of smart glasses for taking photos.” The company’s own launch language talks about a large private display for streaming content, casting screens, opening whiteboards, and turning almost any place into a workspace.
And Snap is trying to make that pitch look less lonely. On Wednesday it announced partnerships with Nvidia, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce to bring Specs into workplaces. Salesforce’s Agentforce will be built into the software, Nvidia will supply AI that can interpret visual environments, and Amazon will provide an AI assistant that responds to voice commands. Spiegel also said the Specs sit on an open-source XR AI platform that businesses are already building on.
All of this comes with a very large bill. Snap’s current Specs program has reportedly burned through more than $3.5 billion, and activist investor Irenic Capital Management wants the effort funded separately. That pushback makes sense, because the rest of the industry has not exactly covered itself in glory here. Meta’s Reality Labs lost about $88.1 billion from 2019 through 2025, while Google’s Glass ended up being pulled from shelves and later dropped from enterprise support too.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when tech keeps trying to declare the phone dead before people are done using it. Snap at least has the decency to aim the glasses at work, where expensive hardware can hide behind “productivity” and a few enterprise logos. Still, pouring billions into a category that keeps eating its own homework is one way to make open-source sound like a funding strategy.
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