Meta Platforms (META) is set to begin its “Meta Connect 2025” event today, Sept. 17, where the focus is expected to be on smart glasses. Among other announcements, the company is expected to officially unveil the rumored Hypernova glasses. These glasses are expected to feature a display and cost $800, which is significantly higher than the Ray-Ban glasses that Meta currently sells.

Meta Is Pivoting to AI and Metaverse 

While Meta has historically been a social media and digital advertisement play, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to reorient the business. Meta has invested heavily in the Reality Labs business that is building the metaverse, which Zuckerberg sees as a key driver of the company’s long-term growth.

However, that business has been a cash guzzler, and in Q2 2025, it reported an operating loss of $4.53 billion on revenues of a mere $370 million. The segment’s quarterly operating losses have been in the ballpark of $4 billion for the last three years, and the collective losses since late 2020 have accumulated to a whopping $70 billion. While the company’s Quest headsets failed to take off, glasses have been a ray of light (no pun intended), and sales of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses more than tripled in the first half of this year. 

AI Devices Could Help Drive Meta’s Growth

Zuckerberg sees artificial intelligence (AI) devices like glasses as one of the five pillars of Meta’s growth strategy. During the Q2 2025 earnings call, he said, “I think that AI glasses are going to be the main way that we integrate superintelligence into our day-to-day lives, so it's important to have all these different styles that appeal to different people in different settings.”

He somewhat rhetorically added that in the future, people who don’t have AI glasses would “probably be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people who you’re working with, or competing against.”

The race for the next computing platform looks quite open, and OpenAI paid a cool $6.5 billion to acquire Jony Ive’s startup, io Products, for a reason. Ive was a former chief design officer at Apple (AAPL), where he helped design the iPhone, and io Products is rumored to be developing a hardware platform to interact with AI, although official details are scarce.

Why the Meta Connect 2025 Event Is So Significant 

Today’s event will be an opportunity for Meta and Zuckerberg to display their version of the company’s future to investors. The company’s pivot to the metaverse has so far been a vanity project, and so have the VR headsets. The reason markets expect Meta to price its new glasses below $1,000 – which it was previously rumored to do – is to increase adoption and aid their mainstreaming. While glasses sales have been strong and Meta is the market leader in the space, it is still too niche a market to challenge the dominance of smartphones as the most popular computing platform.

Why Meta Stock Still Looks Like a Buy

All said, I remain constructive on Meta as the company advances into AI, both on the software and the hardware side. The stock’s valuations might appear a bit stretched as it trades at a forward price-earnings (P/E) multiple of 27.18x, which is well ahead of historical averages.

However, I am not too bothered by the current multiples as first, the stock brings prospects of strong earnings growth over the near foreseeable future, and the P/E-growth (PEG) multiple does not look too demanding at 1.58x.

Secondly, Meta’s earnings have been bogged down by Reality Labs losses, which should start tapering down in due course. Finally, with the foray into AI devices, Meta is laying the launchpad for the next leg of its growth.

I would meanwhile be closely watching the announcement at the Connect 2025 event, as the last thing Meta would want is its glasses failing to hit the right chord with investors.