Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Meta has sold 10 million Oculus Quest 2 headsets, according to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon at the company’s 2021 investor day, giving the best benchmark yet for sales of Meta’s standalone VR platform since it launched last October.

“Our technologies are the ticket to the metaverse,” Amon said, highlighting Qualcomm’s efforts to establish itself as a key player in VR and AR platforms, especially as the tech industry at large is so heavily emphasizing the metaverse concept.

The news doesn’t come directly from Meta itself, but given that the Quest 2 relies on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 chipset to power its standalone VR hardware, Qualcomm does seem like it would have an accurate number for how many headsets have been sold. The previous benchmark for Quest 2 sales came from Meta’s voluntary recall of about 4 million headsets from over the summer, making today’s 10 million mark a significant increase.

The 10 million mark for the Quest 2 is also particularly significant given Meta’s goals for growing a comprehensive VR platform: back in 2019, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented alongside the launch of the original Quest headset that 10 million users was a key threshold before the “ecosystem will just explode.” Mark Bosworth, Meta’s VP of augmented and virtual reality, had also told UploadVR over the summer that he expected Meta to reach its goal of 10 million users “earlier than we had initially expected.”

After publication, a Qualcomm spokesperson reached out to clarify that the 10 million unit number that Amon stated on stage was “an average of third-party market size estimates from industry analysts, and wasn’t meant as an official disclosure of sales numbers by Meta or Qualcomm.”

Update November 16th, 2:52pm ET: Added clarification from Qualcomm, on the 10 million unit number, which had been stated by Amon on stage earlier without the qualifying details that it was actually a third-party estimate.