Beehive Industries and the state of Ohio have each been killing it in the metal 3D printing game. Naturally then, it was only logical for Beehive and Ohio to combine forces, with Beehive announcing last month that it would be acquiring the assets of two machine shops in the Cincinnati area.
Now, in partnership with the workforce development nonprofit JobsOhio and the similar organization REDI Cincinnati, Beehive has announced that the company will be investing $70 million to expand its operations there, a move that will create over 200 new jobs. As the company noted in its previous announcement about the acquisition of assets from the two machine shops, Beehive will stand up a Production Machining Center of Excellence (CoE) in the Cincinnati area, at the same time as it’s establishing a Production AM CoE in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Beehive has been signaling that a major buildup of its production capacity is in the works, first with the announcement earlier this year of a $29.7 million Air Force contract, which it followed up with in June when it announced that it had placed the largest publicly-disclosed single order of EOS machines in history, worth $50 million. Via the latter deal, Beehive will purchase 30 EOS machines over the course of this year, which would push the total number of EOS machines in the company’s fleet to 50.
According to Beehive, the moves that the company has been making are part of an overall strategy aiming to deliver over 8,000 engines annually, aligning with a shifting defense acquisition environment in the US that has led to the Pentagon’s seeking out more work with startups that can provide new generations of weapons systems. Ohio has been a leading beneficiary in this emerging landscape, thanks in no small part to AM-friendly organizations including America Makes and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
In a press release about Beehive Industries’ $70 million investment in Ohio, the state’s governor, Mike DeWine, said, “Beehive Industries’ decision to grow in Southwest Ohio demonstrates once again that our state is the best place in America to do business and the best place to strengthen our national defense. This investment puts our state at the forefront of building the engines our military needs, and we’ll be doing it faster than anyone thought possible.”
Darius Ehteshami, Chief Operations and Finance Officer of Beehive Industries, said, “We are deeply grateful to Governor Mike DeWine, JobsOhio, and REDI Cincinnati for their exceptional collaboration and confidence in Beehive Industries. Their proactive economic tools and regional talent prove that when visionary state leadership aligns with modern defense manufacturing, it creates a model that other states – from the Midwest to the Mountain West – would be wise to emulate.”
The last time that I wrote about a JobsOhio announcement like this, the subject was a partnership with another Colorado-based, metal AM for propulsion specialist, Ursa Major, back in 2024. So Ohio indeed appears to be positioning to become the epicenter of 3D printed engines, which, again, is logical for a state where both America Makes and the AFRL are headquartered. Still, it represents a big win for the idea that historical centers of US manufacturing can be revitalized to support a new hardware tech buildup.
Given the fact that Anduril is spending over a billion dollars to build a manufacturing site in the Columbus area, around 100 miles away from where Beehive will be located, it will be interesting to see just how much the choice of Ohio for Beehive has been influenced by targeting Anduril as a customer. In any case, there seems to be plenty of drone and missile funding to go around, and all the new weapons systems in development will no doubt give rise to all sorts of different customer/supplier combinations in the years ahead.
Meanwhile, when will the sectors of the economy that aren’t just about killing people get in on the action? Does the lethality of the technologies at hand have to be “validated” first before that happens? If so, the horizon for diversification of metal AM adoption growth beyond the military could be getting closer.
And not a moment too soon! The prospects for reshoring in the US still seem to be getting bleaker all the time, but it’s nice to see a startup like Beehive responsible for creating over 200 new jobs that appear far less likely than those in service industries to be automated out of existence with AI at some point in the near future. I’d love to see a similar company pop up with a business model tailored specifically to turbines for the power grid.
Images courtesy of Beehive Industries