Conversations surrounding additive manufacturing (AM) continued to evolve in the past year as the technology demonstrated growing maturity and broader industrial applications across aerospace, defense, medical, energy, and industrial sectors. This shift was evident at multiple conferences and trade shows in late 2025, including Defense TechConnect 2025, Formnext 2025, and the International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing (ICAM) 2025. Three events collectively underscored the transition toward more integrated, production-ready platforms in both the public and private sectors. While each event addressed distinct segments of defense innovation and AM, several themes kept re-emerging: accelerated iteration cycles, scalable industrial capacity, strengthened government-industry-academia collaboration, and increasingly robust digital and data infrastructures to support next-generation manufacturing. Defense TechConnect 2025 addressed the urgent need to align national security innovation with commercial development speeds. Speakers emphasized that nonkinetic capabilities such as cyber, electronic warfare, radio frequency, and sensing degrade quickly during modern conflicts. This reality is driving the need for modular architectures, continuous software delivery platforms, and flexible manufacturing models that shorten upgrade timelines. The event also highlighted critical minerals, energy resilience, and environmental security as strategic levers for long-term competitiveness. Installation modernization approaches, such as intergovernmental support agreements, were also presented as a way to strengthen local partnerships and improve defense resilience. Key takeaways pointed to the need for faster iteration cycles, scalable production capacity, and deeper cross-sector integration to support rapidly evolving defense requirements. As these calls intensify across the defense community, commercial AM innovations, such as those showcased at Formnext 2025, demonstrate how industry is positioning itself to meet and enable these evolving needs. Formlabs booth at IMTS.Formnext 2025 reinforced AM’s continued industrialization and its shift toward scalable, real-world production. The show featured multiple product launches aimed at high-throughput manufacturing, automated workflows, and expanded applications across aerospace, defense, medical, energy, maritime, and industrial sectors. Major traditional machine tool manufacturers, such as DN Solutions (IMTS booth #338919) and Matsuura (IMTS booth #338630), demonstrated their ongoing commitment to AM with hybrid manufacturing systems on display at Formnext. These solutions demonstrated the growing integration of traditional and AM processes. The exhibition floor showcased a broad range of new products: large-format polymer and metal 3D printers, high-performance and recycled materials, expanded robotics integration platforms, and sophisticated digital workflow solutions. Across presentations, speakers emphasized manufacturability, repeatability, and operational performance, reflecting the growth of AM from a prototyping-focused technology towards a credible, cost-effective production method. As AM technologies mature, the conversation turns toward developing qualification pathways and secure digital infrastructure needed to validate and scale these capabilities within regulated, mission-critical environments – key themes discussed at ICAM this year. ICAM 2025 placed a strong focus on streamlining qualification and certification processes to accelerate AM adoption in the U.S. defense industrial base. Over 1,000 participants from industry, government, and academia discussed industrial base resilience, trust and transparency in qualification processes, and the importance of secure digital ecosystems. Panelists stressed the need for cross-certification frameworks to reduce duplicative testing, enhanced data security for distributed and remote printing, and deployable, easy-to-use field manufacturing platforms. Key takeaways emphasized the importance of feature-driven qualification pathways that evaluate specific geometries, microstructures, and performance-critical properties rather than relying solely on material- or process-level approaches. Participants also emphasized the importance of collaborative consortia and expanded use of data-driven design tools to enable scalable, reliable AM production across mission-critical applications. Raise3D booth at IMTS.Together, these events pointed to AM’s continued maturation and mainstream integration, in which national security challenges, industrial requirements, and AM innovations are increasingly interconnected. Defense TechConnect framed the strategic urgency for rapid adaptation and resilient production; Formnext demonstrated the expanding technical and commercial capabilities that make industrial-scale AM possible; and ICAM focused on building trust, streamlining certification frameworks, and securing digital ecosystems required to deploy AM across regulated, high-performance sectors. Across the three events, the overarching trends were clear: the need for faster development and deployment cycles; deeper collaboration across government, industry, and academia; heightened emphasis on supply chain resilience, from critical minerals to qualified AM production; and the central role of digital ecosystems, including data security, workflow automation, and remote manufacturing capabilities. Collectively, the events reflected a shared momentum for AM toward a streamlined, secure, and production-focused AM infrastructure capable of supporting both commercial and defense manufacturing needs. Wurth booth at IMTS.Looking ahead, IMTS 2026, Sept. 14-19 in Chicago, Ill., will feature a growing Additive Manufacturing sector, as well as AMT Emerging Technology Center, highlighting both current and future innovations across the manufacturing landscape. Register at IMTS.com/Register.

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Additive Manufacturing / 3D Printing

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