The Austrian facility might be used to make optical microlenses.
Sony has been preparing for the tip of disc-based PlayStation video games for fairly a while, based mostly on a report by ORF Salzburg, the regional publication of Austria’s nationwide broadcasting community. The administration at Sony’s Digital Audio Disc Company informed 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 informed Thalgau staff about them on July 1, when Sony announced that PlayStation goes all in on digital beginning in January 2028. Optical microlenses can manipulate gentle and are usually utilized in digicam sensors, AR/VR headsets, fiber optic networks and medical gadgets.
The Thalgau plant presently manufactures 600,000 discs day-after-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 one in all Sony’s disc-making factories, it is the place DADC relies. 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 in the present day, it has manufactured 3.4 billion extra discs.
Tanzer informed ORF that the corporate intends to retain the 300 workers presently 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 begin manufacturing them as quickly as subsequent yr.
