Meta makes websites and apps. Historically, they haven't succeeded at lower-level development. A somewhat recent example was when they tried to make a custom OS for their VR headsets, completely failed, and had to continue using Android.
You're generalizing a failure at delivering one consumer solution and ignoring the successful infrastructure research and development that occurs behind the scenes.
Meta builds hardware from chip to cluster to datacenter scale, and drives research into simulation at every scale, all the way to CFD simulation of datacenter thermal management.
More than one failure. They had a project to make a custom chip for model training a few years ago, and they scrapped it. Now they have another one, which entered testing in March. I don't think it's going well, because testing should have wrapped up recently, right before the news that they're in serious talks to buy a lot of TPUs from Google. On the other side of the stack, Llama 4 was a disaster and they haven't shipped anything since.
They have the money and talent to do it. As you point out, they do have major successes in areas that take real engineering. But they also have a lot of failures. It will depend how the internal politics play out, I imagine.
