Velo3D opens 289,000 sq ft Forge 1 campus in Livermore for 40+ large-format LPBF systems

Velo3D has opened Forge 1, a new metal additive manufacturing campus in Livermore, California, spanning just under 289,000 square feet with about 270,000 square feet allocated to production. The facility is initially designed for more than 40 large-format laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) systems and could later expand beyond 100 machines; together with the Fremont headquarters, both sites could host up to 125 systems. Forge 1 collates printer assembly, additive part manufacturing, post-processing, inspection, quality assurance, and customer acceptance at one address. Development, application engineering, and process qualification stay primarily in Fremont, so Livermore is built as the production handoff after programs leave the lab.

For Velo3D, the move is a capacity and trust play aimed at aerospace, defense, and energy applications that need to leave qualification cells and enter repeatable serial runs on U.S. soil. Metal LPBF remains the workhorse path for complex qualified geometries, but fleet scale without an integrated finishing and acceptance chain rarely becomes factory economics-inspection, post-processing, and customer buy-off usually decide whether a part exits pilot status. CEO Arun Jeldi cast Forge 1 as an American manufacturing partner for critical programs and supply-chain resilience, aligning the site with buyers who now weight domestic production location alongside machine performance. Livermore mayor John Marchand welcomed the campus, underscoring the local industrial framing around the opening.

The practical test is ramp discipline: how many of those 40-plus systems are installed, qualified, and producing accepted parts, not how large the shell is on day one. Spatial separation only works if process parameters transfer cleanly from Fremont qualification into Livermore serial flow without reopening multi-year aerospace and defense certification clocks. Until utilization, yield, and acceptance cycle times are visible, Forge 1 is a production-capacity claim whose value rests on converting LPBF floorspace into program-locked, end-to-end metal part throughput.