Kratos Buys an AMCM M 8K to Increase Its AM Capacity in Indiana – 3DPrint.com

As is true concerning the growth of any market, increasing AM adoption happens primarily through industrial clusters, hubs of economic activity which harness and accelerate innovation. While Indiana may not receive as much attention as other locales with high concentrations of manufacturing capacity, the Midwestern state is nonetheless home to a manufacturing cluster that encompasses businesses from across the value chain. For instance, it’s both the number one steel-producing state in the US, as well as the country’s largest exporter of pharmaceuticals.

It’s also becoming more relevant as a hub for defense production, with defense investment in Indiana growing by well over $2 billion since 2020. A big factor in that growth trajectory is the presence of Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane in the state’s southwestern region, near to Indiana University – Bloomington, as well as to the WestGate@Crane Technology Park and the American Center for Manufacturing and Innovation (ACMI). San Diego-based defense contractor Kratos Defense has major operations at both of the latter two sites, and WestGate is the intended destination for the new AMCM M 8K that the company just bought.

Notably, ACMI was the first to acquire an AMCM M 8K machine, which the organization purchased specifically for applications like rocket chambers and fuel tanks. Kratos Defense plans to use its M 8K for hypersonic applications, so presumably this is an example of ACMI’s strategy — enabling its tenants to speed up their uptake of new manufacturing processes relevant to the US military — working as intended.

In any case, it’s an example of what makes the current centerpiece of Kratos’s growth strategy work: defense rocket systems is one of the company’s fastest-growing segments, delivering 46 percent and 50 percent growth YOY, respectively, in Q1 and Q2 of 2026. The company’s ability to grow its rockets business for defense is driven by its experience with enabling technologies, including AM, that allow Kratos to respond with agility to shifts in demand.

AMCM, an EOS brand, is well-poised to capture precisely that market, as the deal demonstrates. The company is something of an ace-in-the-hole for EOS’s ability to maintain its lead in high-value defense applications. EOS’s ability to draw upon AMCM’s know-how no doubt helped the launch of the M4 ONYX, which has been a huge success, and Ursa Major is a major customer for both brands. AMCM recently announced that it is expanding its production capacity in Germany, and the ability to make more M 8K units is one of the advantages of that added capacity.

The proximity of Kratos’s operations to NSWC Crane suggests that both the company and the US Navy could integrate the M 8K into distributed manufacturing workflows, which the Navy is opening up more opportunities for, as indicated by its announcement of Project Peculiar Document back in August. The M 8K would seem to be particularly well-suited to any such effort, given the high barrier-to-entry for such a powerful machine.

Kratos should also benefit insofar as it can use the system to produce components for both the defense and space markets, which overlap extensively in its operations. Earlier this year, Kratos received a US Space Force contract worth up to $446 million to develop ground system architecture for missile defense satellites, and just received a $33.6 million NASA contract “to design, build, and deliver the power conversion system for NASA’s Space Reactor-1 Freedom,” billed as “the first nuclear fission reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft.” It would almost certainly never make sense to purchase an 8-laser machine for prototyping, but if you already own one for rocket production and you have hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts where unusually sophisticated prototyping is required, that potentially changes the economics.

Images courtesy of EOS

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