Meta’s Latest AI Move Includes ARI Acquisition

The ARI acquisition comes as Meta prepares to cut ~10% of its workforce and redirect capital toward AI, with 2026 spending projected up to $135 billion. Robotics and AI research are emerging as priority bets in that shift.

Meta has acquired humanoid robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) for an undisclosed sum. The deal was announced and closed on the same day, May 1, with the entire ARI team joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, the company’s advanced AI research division.

Meta described ARI as a company building AI systems that enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behavior in complex, dynamic environments. The team will work alongside Meta Robotics Studio, a unit the company established in 2025 to develop foundational technology for humanoid systems.

ARI was co-founded by Xiaolong Wang and Lerrel Pinto, both of whom are joining Meta. Wang was previously a researcher at Nvidia and an associate professor at UC San Diego, with recognized work in activation-aware weight quantization, a technique for compressing AI models to run efficiently on the limited compute inside a robot rather than relying on remote data centers. Pinto previously taught at NYU and co-founded Fauna Robotics, which Amazon acquired in March 2026. He then co-founded ARI, which Meta has now absorbed. The startup had raised an undisclosed seed round from AIX Ventures.

On X, Wang said the mission when starting ARI a year ago was to achieve physical AGI, and that real-world deployments made joining Meta the logical next step.

Meta has been building toward this for over a year. In early 2025, a leaked internal memo outlined the company’s ambitions to develop humanoid hardware and AI models for consumers. The company subsequently launched Meta Robotics Studio, hired former Cruise CEO Marc Whitten to lead it, and began recruiting roughly 100 engineers for in-house humanoid development.

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Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has described humanoid robots as the company’s next bet of comparable scale to augmented reality. Meta’s stated strategic intent is to do for humanoid robotics what Android did for smartphones: build the foundational platform that the rest of the industry runs on.

The ARI acquisition adds a specific capability to that platform. ARI’s robot control models are built to handle whole-body humanoid movement in real time, coordinating limbs and balance in response to unpredictable physical inputs. That is one of the harder unsolved problems in humanoid robotics, and it sits directly in the path Meta needs to clear.

The deal comes as Meta prepares to cut approximately 8,000 employees, or 10% of its global workforce, with layoffs beginning May 20. The company is also withdrawing from 6,000 open roles it had planned to fill. The restructuring is funded by a reallocation toward AI infrastructure: Meta’s 2026 capital expenditure guidance stands at $115 billion to $135 billion.

The workforce reductions are concentrated in Reality Labs, the Facebook social division, recruiting, sales, and global operations. AI and robotics research sits in the opposite column.

Superintelligence Labs, the division ARI’s founders are now joining, is led by Alexandr Wang, the Scale AI founder whom Meta hired as Chief AI Officer in June 2025.

The ARI deal is the second significant robotics acquisition in as many months. Amazon acquired Fauna Robotics in March 2026, the same startup that ARI co-founder Lerrel Pinto previously helped build. That both companies were acquired by major technology platforms within weeks of each other points to how concentrated the available talent is in humanoid robotics, and how aggressively the largest players are moving to secure it.

Market projections for the sector vary considerably. Goldman Sachs estimates the humanoid robotics market could reach $38 billion by 2035. Morgan Stanley’s projection extends to $5 trillion by 2050. The spread reflects both the scale of the opportunity and how early the technology still is.

Disclaimer: This news is based on publicly available information. NervNow has not verified the claims independently.

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