Meta announces new engineering hub in Canada, new grants to foster metaverse innovation

Meta on Tuesday announced a new engineering hub in Toronto, Canada, which is expected to create up to 2,500 new jobs over the next several years, with a majority of roles focused on engineering.

The new job roles are expected to span across building extended reality experiences and Meta technologies. Additionally, the company is establishing the first Canadian WhatsApp, Messenger and Remote Presence engineering teams and growing its Canadian Reality Labs and AI Research teams.

Further, Meta has announced an additional $510,000 (CAD) in unrestricted grants to 17 Canadian research labs working on research to advance innovations needed to build the metaverse. Each lab will be receiving $30,000 unrestricted grants from Reality Labs Research. You can see the full list of researchers here.

"Over the next decade, we're helping to build for the metaverse to drive a new generation of immersive online social experiences that have the potential to unlock access to creative, social and economic opportunities. Canadians are already building for this future and will play an important role in shaping it from the start," the company wrote in a blog post.

"Unlocking the full potential of the metaverse will require multiple major technological breakthroughs and collaboration by researchers, industry partners, policy experts, creators and others all over the world. As we embark on this journey of innovation together, thousands of Canadians will find opportunity in helping build for the metaverse — both at Meta and alongside us as creators," it added.