Google has agreed to acquire part of HTC's extended-reality (XR) business for $250 million, expanding its push into virtual and augmented reality hardware The deal involves transferring some of the HTC VIVE engineering staff to Google and granting non-exclusive IP rights.

It marks HTC’s second major deal with Google, which bought part of the Taiwan company’s smartphone operations for $1.1 billion in 2017.

Google’s current focus at the moment outside of AI is their new Android XR platform, where they see an opportunity to jump at the hype of mixed reality headsets after seeing the success Meta has had with its Meta Quest products and partnership with Ray-Ban.