Beehive Industries to invest $70M, add 200+ jobs in Southwest Ohio expansion to scale 3D-printed jet engine production toward 8,000 units annually
Hardware
Originally reported by manilatimes.net
Beehive Industries, JobsOhio, REDI Cincinnati and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced a $70 million expansion of the company's Southwest Ohio operations, creating more than 200 new jobs, at the Farnborough International Airshow. Beehive builds 3D-printed jet engines for uncrewed aerial defense platforms and says the investment supports a manufacturing system designed to produce more than 8,000 engines annually. The company's Frenzy engine is entering full-rate production, backed by a $29.7 million U.S. Air Force contract to advance the Frenzy family. The expansion follows two other 2026 moves: a metal additive manufacturing capacity doubling via what Beehive calls the single-largest publicly disclosed EOS metal printer purchase, and the acquisition of two Cincinnati precision machine shops, Able Tool Corporation and Planet Products Corporation.
The machine-shop acquisitions matter more than the headline dollar figure. Beehive is folding them into a Production Machining Center of Excellence, addressing the post-processing and finish-machining bottleneck that typically caps throughput for laser powder bed fusion parts once a company moves past demo cells into repeatable output. Pairing that with a large EOS printer order and a design-for-AM engine architecture points to a vertically integrated domestic supply chain rather than a machine-shop-of-the-month strategy. The uncrewed aerial systems propulsion niche has drawn political tailwind: defense manufacturers building U.S.-based, additively manufactured engine capacity are being positioned as part of the broader push to shorten defense-program timelines and reduce reliance on fragile supply chains, a theme Ohio officials leaned into directly.
The real test is whether Beehive can convert this capital stack, printers, machine shops, and a USAF contract, into engines shipped at the volumes it is now publicly committing to. Full-rate production of a jet engine family is a different operational discipline than qualifying a first article, and 8,000 units a year implies a cadence closer to consumer or automotive throughput than typical aerospace lot sizes. Additional Air Force or DoD awards over the next several quarters will be the clearest signal of whether Frenzy has moved from contract milestone to sustained program of record.
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