Snap may need to raise money from outside investors to ship its Specs AR glasses, and has even discussed spinning it off as a separate company, The Information reports.

Back in June, Snap announced that it plans to launch fully standalone consumer AR glasses, called Specs. It's set to be the culmination of a decade of the company's work on smart glasses. Snap publicly sold three generations of non-AR camera glasses between 2016 and 2019, years before the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and in recent years has released two AR glasses development kits, called Spectacles.

During that announcement, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed that the company has spent $3 billion so far developing AR glasses. But even this may not be enough.

While $3 billion sounds like a lot, it's a fraction of what Meta has spent developing AR. And given that even Snap's social media business is still making a loss, compared to Meta's north of $60 billion yearly net profit, Spiegel is now "ready to ask for some help", The Information reports.

According to the report, Snap has started discussing the idea of raising money from outside investors to ship Specs, akin to what Google parent Alphabet has done for its Waymo robotaxi subsidiary.

The report also claims that Snap has even discussed "a nuclear option" - spinning off specs into its own business. This would be somewhat impractical, though, given how much core tech like computer vision is shared between Snapchat and the AR glasses.

Even without the potential outside investment, Snap has lofty goals for its consumer AR Specs.

Compared to the current Spectacles development kit, Spiegel claimed that the Specs releasing as a product in 2026 will have "a much smaller form factor, at a fraction of the weight, with a ton more capability", while running all the same Lenses developed so far.

"No bulky headset, no puck, no tether, no phone required", Spiegel boasted, referring to the current development kit, and Snap confirmed to UploadVR that this will be the case for Specs too.

If Snap meets its timeline, it could be the first major tech company to launch true AR glasses. Multiple reports suggest Meta plans to ship its first AR glasses in 2027, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has reported that Apple won't launch AR glasses until 2028 at the earliest.

Snap's strategy of building a fully standalone device is also notable. Meta's Orion prototype used a wireless compute puck, and the company has indicated that its 2027 product will too. Similarly, Apple is widely expected to leverage your iPhone's compute for its eventual AR glasses, though this is far from confirmed.

Trying to pack all of the computing hardware for true AR into a "lightweight pair of glasses" so soon will be a significant engineering challenge for Snap, and we'll be very curious to see how this turns out, as well as how long the battery lasts.