Beehive Industries Pours $70M Into Ohio to Scale 3D Printed Jet Engines

Beehive Industries wants to build more jet engines, and it wants to build them in Ohio. The Denver-based defense contractor announced a $70 million expansion of its Southwest Ohio operations this week, with more than 200 new jobs tied to the project. The announcement was made at the Farnborough International Airshow alongside Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, JobsOhio, and REDI Cincinnati.

Why Ohio

Ohio has spent years positioning itself as a manufacturing-friendly state, and Beehive's decision is a concrete example of that pitch landing. The company is tapping into an existing workforce in the Cincinnati region and pairing it with recent acquisitions of two local precision machine shops, Able Tool Corporation and Planet Products Corporation. Those shops bring more than 120 years of combined aerospace experience and give Beehive a production-ready machining base on day one.

Frenzy engines in full-rate production

The expansion is directly tied to demand for Beehive's Fr small expendable turbine engines. The company's 200-pound-thrust Fr model is already entering full-rate production, and the U.S. Air Force awarded Beehive $29.7 million in April to finish vehicle integration, flight testing, and qualification of that engine. A smaller 100-pound-thrust version is also in the works.

What makes Beehive unusual is that it designed its propulsion systems around additive manufacturing from the beginning, rather than retrofitting an existing engine design for 3D printing. That gives the company a fully domestic, tightly controlled supply chain, and it lets the company move from concept to flight-ready hardware in months instead of years. The company says it is aiming for more than 8,000 engines per year once the new lines are running.

A printer fleet that keeps growing

The Ohio expansion adds to a much larger capital push already underway across Beehive's manufacturing network. In June, the company committed more than $50 million to 30 EOS M4 ONYX metal 3D printers, which EOS described as the largest single publicly disclosed order in its history. Those machines are heading to Beehive's Knoxville, Tennessee and Centennial, Colorado facilities over the next 12 months.

Days after that order, Beehive acquired an even more extreme capability: multi-unit orders for Nikon SLM Solutions NXG 600E metal 3D printers. The NXG 600E is the biggest machine in Nikon SLM's lineup, with a build envelope of 600 by 600 by 1500 millimeters and twelve 1-kilowatt lasers for serial production of large metal parts. That is a rare capability in the United States, and it lets Beehive print very large engine components in-house rather than outsourcing them.

What this means for defense additive manufacturing

Beehive's expansion fits a broader pattern. Defense officials from Washington to the Midwest have been arguing that manufacturing speed is a security issue, and that slow permitting, brittle supply chains, and foreign dependencies are genuine risks. Ohio's Team Ohio initiative packages construction-ready sites, faster permitting, and workforce pipelines as a direct answer to those concerns.

For the 3D printing industry, the signal is clear: metal additive manufacturing is moving from pilot programs to production floors funded by defense contracts. Beehive is one of the first companies to prove that a fully digital, in-house manufacturing chain can win large-scale production work from the Pentagon. If the company hits its output targets, it will set a benchmark for how defense additive programs actually scale.