Smart glasses sales explode 167% year-over-year in Q1 2026 as AI supercharges AR technology, with broader AR/VR categories surging 86%, driven by consumer demand for real-world AI assistants and fueled by breakthroughs in chip miniaturization and display tech that are pushing the industry closer than ever to mainstream adoption.
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warns ASML that a cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet lithography machine — critical for making advanced chips and never legally permitted for export to China — may have illegally reached the country, posing a major challenge for the Dutch chip-equipment giant under the Trump administration.
Snap launches Spectacles AR glasses at $2,195, delivering a 115-inch virtual cinema screen in a lightweight 136-gram wearable that bridges the gap between smart glasses and full headsets, targeting developers and early adopters as a milestone toward an AI-powered future that could eventually replace smartphones.
Amazon is entering the AI chip market as a seller, with its AI chief confirming talks to supply custom Trainium3 chips to outside companies, directly challenging Nvidia's dominance in the booming AI infrastructure space.
NVIDIA launches an open source XR AI beta platform enabling developers to build real-time visual and voice AI agents for AR glasses and XR headsets, powered by GPU-accelerated services including Cosmos, Nemotron, and NeMo Agent Toolkit.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel unveils SPECS augmented reality glasses at Augmented World Expo, positioning the device as a full spatial computer backed by 12 years of development that could replace smartphones by bringing technology into the real world rather than away from it.
Microsoft is expanding its Phi Silica AI model to Nvidia RTX 30-series and newer GPUs with at least 6GB of VRAM in an early developer preview, bringing local AI capabilities to more Windows users beyond Copilot+ PCs, though GPU-based execution lacks some NPU-exclusive features like prompt compression and speculative decoding.
Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon Reality Elite chip at Augmented World Expo, delivering 48 TOPS of on-device AI performance, 4.4K-per-eye visuals at 90fps, and 20% better battery life to power next-gen AR headsets, including the newly launched XREAL Project Aura glasses running Google's Android XR platform.
Atom Computing secures $100 million in Series C funding led by Third Point Ventures, cementing its position as one of only nine U.S. government-backed quantum computing startups and signaling surging investor confidence in the quantum computing sector.
Snap launches SPECS, a $2,195 pair of AR glasses powered by dual Snapdragon chips and contextual AI, offering a 51-degree field-of-view display and up to 20 hours of battery life, now available for pre-order ahead of a fall release in the US, UK, and France.