Sony's PlayStation disc factory is already being repurposed
Sony plans to cut disc production by 90% by 2028 and retrain 300 employees to produce optical microlenses, investing €30 million in the transition.
Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer told ORF Salzberg that the company's Thalgau plant in Austria produces 600,000 discs daily, half of which are for PlayStation. However, by 2028, that volume is expected to drop to just 10 percent, prompting the company to retrain all 300 employees to work on optical microlenses instead.
Thalgau is Sony's only remaining wholly owned disc manufacturing facility. The company previously closed disc plants in the United States – in Terre Haute, Indiana, and later in New Jersey. The Indiana facility now caters to automakers, handling packaging and assembly of headlights and similar components.
The transition to microlenses has been in the works for some time; a behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 already showed the plant working on these lenses. Sony has invested €30 million in microlens production, and mass production could begin as early as next year. Microlenses are used to bend light in various emerging applications, including projecting car turn signals onto asphalt.
According to Sony DADC's website, the company has produced over 26.4 billion discs to date, with the vast majority – 23 billion – made at the Terre Haute plant between 1983 and 2022.
