The Austrian facility shall be used to make optical microlenses.
Sony has been getting ready for the tip of disc-based PlayStation video games for fairly a while, primarily based on a report by ORF Salzburg, the regional publication of Austria’s nationwide broadcasting community. The administration at Sony’s Digital Audio Disc Company advised ORF that the corporate has already invested €30 million ($34 million) into changing its disc manufacturing facility in Thalgau, Salzburg right into a plant for optical microlenses.
These adjustments have apparently been within the works for fairly a while, although administration solely advised Thalgau staff about them on July 1, when Sony introduced that PlayStation goes all in on digital beginning in January 2028. Optical microlenses can manipulate gentle and are sometimes utilized in digital camera sensors, AR/VR headsets, fiber optic networks and medical units.
The Thalgau plant at the moment manufactures 600,000 discs each day, with half of that quantity going to PlayStation video games. Sony DADC CEO Dietmar Tanzer expects disc manufacturing to drop to 10 p.c of the plant’s present output in 2028. As The Verge notes, the Thalgau facility is not simply certainly one of Sony’s disc-making factories, it is the place DADC is predicated. DADC used to have a mass manufacturing facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, the place it made 23 billion discs from 1983 till it closed in 2022. From that point till right now, it has manufactured 3.4 billion extra discs.
Tanzer advised ORF that the corporate intends to retain the 300 workers at the moment working for it on the Thalgau plant. They are going to be retrained for the manufacturing of optical microlenses within the close to future, since Sony plans to start out manufacturing them as quickly as subsequent 12 months.
