Meta Denies Claims It Plans To Outsource Quest Headset Design To China

Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth denied claims that Quest headset design will be outsourced to Goertek, the company's Chinese manufacturer.

The claim first emerged last week as a rumor spread by former VR developer Cix Liv. Cix claimed Meta's headset design team "is gone", and that Goertek would take over the role "100%". Bosworth directly and publicly denied this in a reply on X.

Cix further claimed this would be followed up by mass layoffs in the Quest segment of Meta's Reality Labs division in Q1 2025, as part of a shift away from VR to AR, which Bosworth also denied.

The central claim reemerged today, in a far less outlandish form, in a report from The Information which claims that Meta plans to offload much of its Quest hardware development process to Goertek in the future.

Meta has worked closely with Goertek to understand the constraints and costs of different approaches since the original Oculus Rift, as part of the design for manufacturability (DFM) process. But The Information claims that Meta plans to shift "the design of components such as lenses and displays to Goertek", and that Goertek has "started designing the outer shell" of future Quest headsets. It even makes the significant claim that Meta wants Goertek to fully design Quest headsets by 2030.

However, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth publicly and directly denied the claim of Quest headset design being outsourced in a series of posts on X, and suggested that the idea was pushed to The Information by the same person who suggested it to Cix.

"We continue to design our headsets in house as we have and have no plans to change that," Bosworth writes. "We always partner with our manufacturers to a degree but nothing material is changing there."

"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", Bosworth continued, "But this isn't a change from how we've done business with them even as we scale it up".

In response to further agitation from Cix, linking to The Information article in an attempt to justify his claims, Bosworth once again denied the report, directly stating "The article is wrong", and making his strongest statement yet: "Anyone shopping this nonsense is either a liar or a fool."