The Face Computer

The next great consumer-hardware category may sit on your nose, and it is arriving fast. Global smart-glasses shipments grew 110% in the first half of 2025 and 139% in the second, a market roughly doubling year on year, with AI-enabled glasses now the overwhelming majority of it.^[1][2] The question is who wins it, and the answer is more contested than the headlines suggest.

Meta owns the front page: its Ray-Ban glasses held around 82% of shipments in the second half of 2025.^[1] But directly behind it sits a Chinese company. Xiaomi ranked second globally after launching its AI glasses in June 2025 at 1,999 yuan, roughly $275, with shipments up more than 200%.^[1][3] And in augmented-reality glasses specifically, Chinese brands Xreal, Rokid and RayNeo led a market that sold some 284,000 consumer AR units in China alone in 2024.^[4]

Meta wins the brand. China wins the supply chain, including the factory that assembles Meta’s glasses.

Whose glasses are these, really?

Look under the brand and the picture tilts further east. China’s Goertek manufactures Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, and Chinese firms supply much of the category’s hardest components — the micro-displays, camera modules and optics.^[1] Even where a Western brand wins the customer, a Chinese supply chain wins the build.

Two honest caveats. China’s share of glasses as a consumption market is small, around 6%, which is a different thing from the share held by Chinese brands, which is large; the two are easily and often confused. And precise share figures for Rokid, Baidu and Alibaba’s glasses are not cleanly published, so those belong in the story qualitatively.

The consequence for portfolios

Smart glasses are the clearest new hardware category since the smartwatch, and China’s position in it is the pattern worth noting: not the marquee brand, but the strong number two plus ownership of the manufacturing and components that every brand depends on. That is a familiar and durable place to sit, the picks-and-shovels of a gold rush, and it means Chinese firms benefit whether Meta wins or a home-grown brand breaks through. We track the category on two axes: the branded contest, where Xiaomi is the credible challenger, and the supply chain, where China is already, quietly, indispensable.