Midjourney says it’s ‘getting into hardware’

Midjourney, the AI image-generating company that’s reportedly raking in over $200 million in revenue without a single dime of VC investment, is officially getting into hardware.

The company made the announcement in on a post on X on Wednesday. Midjourney’s new hardware team will be based in San Francisco, it revealed.

Exactly what sort of hardware might two-year-old Midjourney, which has a team of under 100 people, pursue? Well, there might be a clue in Midjourney’s hiring of Ahmad Abbas in early February. For more than five years, Abbas — an ex-Neuralink staffer — helped develop the Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s mixed reality headset, most recently as hardware engineering manager. 

Midjourney CEO David Holz is no stranger to hardware himself. He co-founded Leap Motion, which built motion tracking peripherals. (Abbas worked together with Holz, in fact.)

Despite the lawsuits over its AI training approach working their way through the courts, Midjourney has said it’s continued to develop models for video and 3D generation. The hardware could perhaps be related to those efforts somehow.