Beehive Industries Bets $70M on 3D-Printed Jet Engines in Ohio

The investment

Beehive Industries announced a $70 million expansion in Southwest Ohio at the Farnborough International Airshow. The money builds a full-rate production line for the company's 3D-printed Frenzy jet engine family, designed for uncrewed defense systems. The project creates more than 200 high-skilled jobs and targets annual production above 8,000 engines.

The timing is not accidental. The Pentagon has made domestic supply chains for defense manufacturing a priority, and jet engines remain one of the hardest components to source quickly. Beehive's answer is to design the engine for additive manufacturing from the start, then keep every step in house.

Why 3D printing changes the engine business

Jet propulsion has always been slow and capital intensive. Traditional engines require tooling, machining, and long assembly cycles. Beehive consolidated design, metal 3D printing, precision machining, and final assembly into a single footprint in Ohio. The company says that structure compresses development timelines from years to months.

The Frenzy engine family is already backed by a $29.7 million Air Force contract. Beehive also acquired two Cincinnati-area precision machine shops, Able Tool Corporation and Planet Products Corporation, to form its Production Machining Center of Excellence. The company placed what it describes as the largest publicly disclosed order of EOS metal 3D printers to double additive capacity.

What this means for defense manufacturing

Scaling an additively manufactured jet engine to 8,000 units a year is a significant threshold. Most metal 3D printing remains in low-rate prototyping or small-batch production. Beehive is trying to move into true volume production, where unit cost and repeatability matter more than material science experiments.

The company's approach also keeps the supply chain domestic. From metal powder to finished engine, the process stays in the United States. That is a selling point for defense customers who worry about foreign-sourced components in critical systems.

Beehive's expansion is a concrete example of how additive manufacturing is moving from experimental to operational in defense. If the company hits its output target, it will be one of the largest producers of metal 3D-printed engines in the country.