Google made the announcement on its blog. There, the company writes:
“We’ve been investing in XR for more than a decade, and just last month introduced the Android XR platform with our strategic industry partners. Today we signed an agreement to welcome some of the HTC VIVE engineering team to Google, which is subject to customary closing conditions. They are an incredibly strong technical team with a proven track record in the VR space, and we are looking forward to working with them to accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headsets and glasses ecosystem.”
HTC is bad at making vr headsets. That was not a good deal for google. The og htc vive was literally carried by valve.