The hitting time of clique factors

In [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 375 (2022), no. 1, 627–668], Kahn gave the strongest possible, affirmative, answer to Shamir's problem, which had been open since the late 1970s: Let and let be divisible by . Then, in the random ‐uniform hypergraph process on vertices, as soon as the last isolated vertex disappears, a perfect matching emerges. In the present work, we prove the analogue of this result for clique factors in the random graph process: at the time that the last vertex joins a copy of the complete graph , the random graph process contains a ‐factor. Our proof draws on a novel sequence of couplings which embeds the random hypergraph process into the cliques of the random graph process. An analogous result is proved for clique factors in the ‐uniform hypergraph process ().