Sources: Meta is struggling to move hardware manufacturing out of China; after abandoning its smartwatch plans, the company is still working on a wrist wearable
The company needs China's factories as it pushes to become a hardware producer — SAN FRANCISCO — For more than a year … Tweets: @lizzadwoskin , @geoffreyfowler , @pstasiatech , and @rnaudbertrand Tweets: Elizabeth Dwoskin / @lizzadwoskin : NEW: Facebook has spent the last several years bashing China. Now it needs it factories to make hardware. Via Me & @cdcshepherd https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Geoffrey A. Fowler / @geoffreyfowler : “Made in China” comes with baggage for Facebook https://twitter.com/... Paul Triolo / @pstasiatech : Facebook's hardware ambitions are undercut by its anti-China strategy ...now Meta has a growing problem: The social media service wants to transform itself into a powerhouse in hardware, and it makes virtually all of it in China. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Arnaud Bertrand / @rnaudbertrand : Turns out “I'm anti-China, the country that makes the stuff my company's future relies on” isn't such a smart positioning after all... https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This follows the Washington Post's report a day earlier that Meta was hunting for suppliers outside China for its next wearable (the wrist-device program) — today's follow-up adds that the smartwatch has been killed while the broader wrist wearable survives. The through-line is a company whose hardware ambitions keep colliding with where the factories actually are.
The dependency is not new inside Meta: back in 2019 Facebook commissioned an in-house operating system built from scratch specifically to stop relying on Android for Oculus and Portal. The manufacturing story is the physical-layer version of the same problem — strategic autonomy declared, infrastructure dependence retained.
First-order effects
- Meta's surviving wrist-wearable program stays tethered to Chinese suppliers because the company cannot find equivalent component sources elsewhere, putting its post-smartwatch hardware roadmap on China's production schedule.
- Cancelling the smartwatch concentrates Meta's consumer hardware bets on fewer devices, which raises the cost of any slip in the supplier transition.
Second-order effects
- The sourcing bind undercuts Meta's own positioning: the same company reportedly exploring Quest distribution talks with Tencent and other Chinese tech firms cannot fully decouple commercially either, leaving it exposed on both the factory floor and the sales channel.
- Chinese suppliers gain negotiating leverage over Meta, which must either pay up, accept delays, or ship designs compromised by whatever components are available outside China.
Third-order effects
- If a company with Meta's resources cannot relocate wearable production, US consumer-hardware firms are more likely to pursue partial diversification than full exit — leaving China as the default manufacturing base for the category regardless of public rhetoric.
- The pattern points toward control-stack thinking hardening into doctrine: owning the OS layer (the 2019 effort) and owning the supply chain become paired goals, and companies that fail at one compensate by doubling down on the other.
The trend: Big Tech's supply-chain decoupling rhetoric is running into the concentration of component manufacturing in China, with even Meta-scale companies unable to move hardware production on demand.