Smart Glasses Are Becoming Big Tech’s Next Battleground. These Stocks Could Benefit
Eyewear is turning into a computing platform. AI is moving into smart glasses, and the biggest technology companies are each building a version. Meta Platforms kicked off the latest scramble at its September developer conference, putting a new group of suppliers in focus.
The category is scaling fast
Zuckerberg built the keynote around Muse, Meta’s new AI agent, and the glasses are central to how he wants people to use it. He said Muse could run hands-free through a wake word in the coming months.
Meta also showed the keychain-sized Muse Charm and new virtual-reality glasses priced at $1,299 for spring 2027. Audio-only frames without cameras joined the lineup amid continued pushback over glasses that can record in public.
"The centerpiece of what we're building is Muse."
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Platforms
The push comes as smart glasses move beyond a niche category. Global shipments hit 8.7M units in 2025, more than quadruple the prior year, and Omdia expects 15M this year.
Meta controls more than 85% of the market, though the business remains small. Reality Labs generated $2.21B in 2025 sales, up from $2.15B in 2024.
Competition is coming fast. Apple, Alphabet, and Samsung are all preparing launches, with J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee estimating Apple could ship 50M pairs by the end of the decade, generating more than $15B in revenue.
Why the smartphone hub is at risk
Muse hit 2.5M downloads in its first two weeks, Bank of America's Wamsi Mohan told clients. The app currently sits at No. 1 in Apple's App Store.
The agent plugs directly into Shopify's Shop Pay and has partnerships with Expedia and PayPal. That lets Meta route commerce around Apple's App Store gatekeeping and Apple Pay.
Needham's Laura Martin calls Apple broadly a "single-product" company built around the iPhone. In her view, a rival embedding agentic AI into its own hardware is now the biggest risk Apple shareholders carry.
Where the tradeable exposure sits
Suppliers and retailers capture the demand without betting on which platform wins. Qualcomm makes the processor inside Meta's glasses and targets more than $2B in extended-reality revenue by 2029, a goal CFO Akash Palkhiwala says the company is "well ahead" of.
Qualcomm stock has fallen 23% over the past year on smartphone weakness. GlobalFoundries supplies display and radio components, which matter more as glasses add built-in screens.
"This is over a billion dollars' worth of opportunity for all the foundries combined."
Faisal Saleem, GlobalFoundries
EssilorLuxottica, Meta's manufacturing partner and the owner of Ray-Ban, hit record highs in late 2025 and has a market cap just over $100B. Stifel's Cedric Rossi expects smart eyewear to lift its September-quarter sales despite soft consumer demand.
EssilorLuxottica shares have still pulled back sharply on Apple and Google competition. Warby Parker is Google's US eyewear partner and took a $75M investment from the company.
Its Intelligent Eyewear launches this fall with Samsung hardware and Google's Gemini assistant, and the stock has jumped 17% since Meta's announcement. Stifel's Peter McGoldrick rates it Hold with a $25 target and forecasts ~700K pairs sold by 2030.
National Vision could stock Meta glasses across all stores by the end of the second quarter. UBS analyst Michael Lasser rates it Buy with a $42 target and sees smart glasses at ~10% of sales by 2030.
Smaller names carry more risk. Enovix builds silicon-anode batteries and trades near $5 after a 30%-plus decline, with Benchmark's Mickey Legg at Buy and a $25 target. Vuzix is a $200M market cap augmented-reality specialist holding more than 450 patents and pending patents.
Privacy is the live problem. Meta and EssilorLuxottica face a US lawsuit seeking class-action status, alleging smart-glasses footage was routed to contractors in Africa for AI training.
Meta says media stays on a user’s device unless shared and that it filters content for privacy. But mass adoption isn’t guaranteed, and regulation remains an open question. The category is growing fast without a clear winner, making the suppliers behind the glasses another way to play the trend.
