Sony has already invested €30M in converting its Austrian Thalgau plant from disc pressing to optical microlens production, retaining all 300 workers. The mechanism explains why.
The Austrian factory that has been pressing PlayStation discs for decades is not closing when Sony ends disc-based games in 2028. It is being rebuilt into an optical-lens plant, with roughly €30 million (about $34 million) already invested and the facility's 300 workers retained and retrained rather than laid off (ORF Salzburg, Engadget).
The factory is Sony's Thalgau plant in Salzburg province, run by a unit called Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation, or DADC. On July 1, 2026, DADC management told staff that the conversion has been underway for some time and microlens manufacturing is targeted to start as soon as next year (The Verge). The briefing landed the same week Sony confirmed it will end physical PlayStation games starting January 2028 (Eurogamer).
The mechanism is straightforward. Pressing a Blu-ray uses injection-molded polycarbonate and precision bonding. Fabricating a polymer microlens array uses injection molding and nanoimprinting at sub-millimeter tolerances. Same cleanroom discipline, same tooling class, same inspection regime.
Thalgau currently produces 600,000 discs a day, about half of which are PlayStation games. Sony DADC CEO Dietmar Tanzer expects that disc volume to drop to roughly 10 percent of current levels by 2028 (Engadget). The product filling the gap, microlenses, are small optical components that steer or focus light inside camera sensors, augmented-reality and virtual-reality headsets, fiber-optic networks, medical devices, and automotive lighting and sensing systems.
Sony DADC's micro-optics unit lists injection molding, nanoimprinting, precision bonding, and dicing as its core production technologies for industrial, consumer, and automotive customers (Sony DADC). It is not a new line being built from scratch.
In September 2024 the European Photonics Industry Consortium, EPIC, held its Technology Meeting on Photonics for Miniaturized Optics at the DADC unit, drawing 25 speakers from groups including Fraunhofer, Joanneum Research, Silicon Austria Labs, EVG, and Nanoscribe (Sony DADC). Automotive lighting suppliers HELLA and ZKW Group were among the participants. Sinisa Dohnal, Sony DADC's head of business development, presented alongside Christian Vogl, who publicly positions his work around polymer meta-lenses, diffractive optics, and ground-projection signal lighting for cars (Christian Vogl).
The Thalgau announcement effectively scales up an existing capability rather than spawning a new one. Inside Sony, the microlens business also has a built-in customer. Sony's image-sensor division uses microlens arrays on the pixels of its CMOS sensors for cameras, AR/MR hardware, and automotive driver-assistance systems (Sony).
Thalgau is Sony's last remaining PlayStation disc plant in the European Union, after the closure of DADC's Terre Haute, Indiana facility in 2022 (Engadget). Coverage of the July 1 announcement has tended to frame Sony's January 2028 disc exit as a console-cycle story. The underlying industrial mechanic is that one European factory, and one set of transferable precision-manufacturing skills, is being moved off a sunsetting line and onto a market uncorrelated with gaming cycles (Squared).
The risk worth flagging: microlens demand depends on segments, including AR/VR headsets, automotive lighting, and fiber optics, that have their own adoption curves, none of which the public sources quantify for Thalgau specifically. Sony DADC's existing customer roster from the EPIC 2024 program signals automotive and consumer targets, but conversion volumes and unit pricing have not been disclosed.
What is confirmed today is the operational shape: the same factory footprint, the same 300 workers, and a €30 million check already written to repurpose machines from one precision process to the next.