You would maintain the Singapore Grand Prix at Changi close to the airport. There’s land out by the airport, the logistics can be less complicated, the drivers would barely discover, and no one anyplace would watch it.
What makes Singapore the most effective nights of the season is that they shut town and run the race by the center of it. Floodlights on the water. The skyline leaning over the pit straight. Boundaries threaded between workplace towers that don’t have any enterprise being that near a racing automobile. The corners themselves are nothing particular. The setting is your entire level.
I landed ten days after this 12 months’s race and town was nonetheless taking it aside. Grandstand scaffolding half down round Marina Bay, particles fencing stacked alongside the pavement ready for lorries, the racing line nonetheless painted onto roads that had gone again to carrying taxis. A couple of minutes’ stroll from all of it, at Suntec Conference Middle, the additive manufacturing business was quietly making the identical argument about itself.
The International Additive Manufacturing Summit (GAMS) 2026 and the relaunched Industrial Transformation Asia-Pacific (ITAP) have moved again into city. In July 2027, ITAP goes to Marina Bay Sands. The business is shifting into the neighbourhood the Grand Prix had solely simply completed packing away.
Out of the shed and again into town
For the previous few years this present meant Singapore Expo, out by Changi. ITAP ran there in 2024 and 2025, and on paper it’s the proper reply. You land, you’re on the present flooring inside half an hour, the resort shuttle is ready, and for an occasion pulling delegates in from throughout the area that issues.
It’s also a corridor subsequent to a runway. The day begins when the doorways open and ends after they shut, and the one factor inside strolling distance is one other corridor. Downtown, you end a session and you’re in Singapore, fairly than in an exhibition centre that occurs to be in Singapore, and the dialog carries on into the night as a result of there may be someplace for it to hold on to.
That appears like a delicate level and it is not. The argument working by each occasions this 12 months was that additive has to cease speaking to itself, and the only largest lever a convention holds over that’s the place it places folks after six o’clock. Suntec felt totally different from the previous few outings. Marina Bay Sands subsequent July ought to push it additional once more.
The industrialisation session
I moderated the session on industrialising additive manufacturing, which ran 4 quick talks straight right into a panel. Dr Karsten Heuser, vice chairman of additive manufacturing at Siemens Digital Industries. Julian Rascol, head of the Airbus Tech Hub Singapore. Lorenzo Gasparoni, 3D printing programme supervisor at Alstom. And Dr Naomi L. Nathan, head of the healthcare division at Mobility Goes Additive.
4 sectors, and broadly one story. The printing works. Every thing across the printing is what’s holding it up.
Heuser’s framing was the one which arrange the remainder. Additive spent a couple of decade believing it was going to disrupt the availability chain, he mentioned, and it did not. “If Airbus is proudly owning the applying, or if Adidas is promoting sneakers, or if Apple is promoting iPhones, they do not personal machines for additive. They do not buy powder.” What truly labored was much less romantic: current suppliers, those already good at casting for a selected business or already good at injection moulding, bolting additive onto what they do. “Foxconn isn’t in all probability recognized a lot about delivering plane components, however Foxconn might be the largest producer for Apple. Why ought to this alteration?”
Rascol gave the clearest numbers of the day. Airbus has round 10,000 metallic AM components flying. It produces about 5,000 a 12 months, and desires roughly 20,000 a 12 months inside 5 years. What’s stopping it isn’t printer capability. It’s {that a} licensed half wants a enterprise case, which implies it must be both excessive quantity or genuinely essential, and the essential finish is precisely the place the know-how is least mature. There’s a second brake too, and it’s a blunt one: the machines are usually not standardised in opposition to one another, so you can not assume the identical construct on a distinct machine provides you an identical half.
Gasparoni had the numbers that make the industrial case. Alstom has printed round 250,000 components, saved €46 million, principally by stock discount by way of its digital warehouse, and saved greater than 250,000 days of lead time, which on a railway means trains in service fairly than trains ready. The aim is to get 20% of the invoice of supplies printable.
His Singapore instance was a pleasant one for the room. A metallic impeller for a traction converter, beforehand welded and riveted collectively, reprinted in 316L on laser powder mattress fusion. It got here out cheaper, extra secure, simpler to steadiness, simpler to wash, and it vibrated much less, which mattered as a result of the vibration had been damaging the electronics sitting subsequent to it.
However rail has no commonplace for certifying printed components. Alstom controls the method to ISO/ASTM 52920 after which certifies half by half in opposition to its personal guidelines, printing check specimens with each batch. A single metallic validation specimen runs to round €1,000, they usually print greater than three. “In some nations,” Gasparoni mentioned, “the belief in additive manufacturing may be very low.”
Dr Nathan’s case was that healthcare is the toughest model of the identical drawback. Her map of the limitations put the know-how on the backside of the listing. The true obstacles are regulatory approval, reimbursement, enterprise fashions, and high quality and abilities. The industrialised examples exist, and no two of them received there the identical approach: Stryker with over 1,000,000 printed knees after twenty years of course of validation, Materialise approving a household of gadgets fairly than particular person components, Lima Company going into the hospital itself. The US solely created billing codes for 3D printing final 12 months. Throughout a lot of Europe there may be nonetheless no one to ship the bill to. Spain has hospitals working tons of of initiatives with no reimbursement route, and the Netherlands has simply issued a nationwide guideline that claims as a lot out loud.
Requirements, and the UK turning up as a mannequin
Requirements had been the place each sector converged, and the UK got here up in a approach I used to be not anticipating.
Dr Nathan made the purpose that the business’s actual job is to be in the precise rooms with the individuals who already write healthcare regulation, fairly than inventing its personal discussion board. Her proof was two days previous. The UK had simply confirmed it would settle for CE-marked medical gadgets in Nice Britain indefinitely. The dedication nonetheless wants laws, which the federal government says will probably be in place earlier than 30 June 2028, when the primary of the present transition deadlines runs out.
I recommended from the chair that she was being beneficiant to us. The UK has its personal UKCA mark and that route stays open, however round 90% of gadgets on the British market already carry CE, and the sincere studying of the choice is that after Brexit we didn’t have the capability to run a parallel system and have quietly accepted someone else’s. Beneficiant or not, the impact is similar, and it factors at one thing greater. If extra of the world adopted shared requirements fairly than near-identical competing ones, a substantial amount of duplicated work would merely cease current.
Nathan additionally had the road that ought to fear anybody on this business who thinks the argument is gained. She spends plenty of her time with well being ministers and European commissioners, and the response she nonetheless will get is on 3D printing is: “Oh, I assumed we made toys.”
AI, and the query no one fairly answered
AI ran by the entire day, and the panels had been way more constructive about it than the broader dialog exterior this business. The helpful framing was sensible fairly than existential. Additive has all the time had extra variables than anybody can observe by hand, and the factor that has modified is the power to course of the information coming off a construct.
Kitty Wang, CEO of SynaCore gave the sharpest instance. One in every of its prospects prints blades, and had sensors in its machines, full design and measurement information, and three years of failed prints sitting on cabinets. Gathering the information was not sufficient by itself. Fed right into a closed-loop digital twin, distortion the client had been combating for years was introduced inside 200 microns in three rounds, with out anybody touching the printer.
On my panel, Heuser described AI as a co-worker fairly than a substitute: one thing that turns a four-day hunt for a root trigger into an hour, and that begins predicting failures as soon as it could see throughout the information silos an organization often retains separate. The human nonetheless indicators the half off. Rascol drew the road tougher. Airbus has been utilizing AI in a single type or one other for about 40 years, he mentioned, however giant language fashions are a distinct factor, and in safety-critical processes they aren’t going anyplace close to manufacturing. “There is not any pathway to certification of such AI.”
What no one actually handled was dependency. The query was put to the morning panel by Joris Peels of AM Analysis, roughly instantly: what occurs to your corporation when you lose entry to the AI you depend on? The solutions had been a declare that greater than 80% of AI content material now makes use of open fashions, which went unsourced, and an inexpensive however normal level that entrepreneurs have all the time managed dependencies by constructing in redundancy. Open weights nonetheless should run on someone’s compute, and that’s the tougher dependency to route round.
Then the dialog moved on. For a summit themed on resilient industries, on a day in any other case filled with tariffs, export controls and the place components get made, that was a spot.
No one is on the centre of the universe
Probably the most helpful factor mentioned all day was additionally the least flattering to the business internet hosting the occasion.
“Do not be boastful and put your self within the centre of the universe,” Heuser mentioned. “We’re only one step in a much bigger manufacturing chain.” There is no such thing as a additive half anyplace that doesn’t contain one other manufacturing course of at some stage, and the pitch to prospects ought to be value, worth, high quality and lead time, the issues they already purchase on, fairly than a disruptive new know-how.
You would see the identical pondering elsewhere within the programme. Moveon Applied sciences builds the majority of its injection mould instruments by precision machining after which suits printed porous inserts the place standard vents clog, plus printed conformal cooling that follows the form of the half. Michael Agam of Tulip Interfaces put it plainly: additive and subtractive “will all the time be dwelling alongside one another.”
Rascol had the final phrase on my panel and it was the road of the day. “It is irrelevant to say it is additive. It is a manufacturing know-how and you must use it as such.”
What Singapore signed
The identical argument about alliances got here up, with a warning connected. “Typically we are inclined to type one other alliance, which might be one other silo of good folks having an trade with one another,” Heuser mentioned. His recommendation was to go the place the alliances already are, in casting, in automotive, in aerospace, in requirements. Nathan agreed from the healthcare facet: “We need not reinvent the wheel, however we have to faucet into what’s being finished and produce our proof alongside.”
Singapore spent the summit doing precisely that. NAMIC, the Nationwide Additive Manufacturing Innovation Cluster, introduced three partnerships:
- Bavaria Makes: a four-year MoU with the Bavarian alliance whose founding members embody Siemens, EOS, Oerlikon and TU Munich. Heuser, who signed it the day earlier than, mentioned it connects Bavaria’s 150-plus lively AM firms with Singapore companions, with scholar, masters and PhD trade inbuilt.
- A manufacturing chain: a five-year MoU between A*STAR‘s Additive Innovation Centre, Forefront Additive Manufacturing, GD Precision and ATC Globe Holdings, masking design by to production-ready half.
- ASTM Worldwide: a five-year extension of a partnership that has already produced 4 worldwide requirements developed in Singapore.
Not considered one of them is about shopping for machines. They’re about qualification, provide chains and requirements, which is exactly what the folks already producing at scale spent the day asking for.
The setting is the purpose
ITAP’s relaunch is constructed on the identical premise as every part mentioned on stage, shifting producers out of pilots and into manufacturing. The full-scale occasion returns to Marina Bay Sands from 20 to 22 July 2027.
Each speaker in my session mentioned a model of the identical factor. The printer was by no means the onerous half. What decides whether or not additive industrialises is every part organized round it: the requirements, the suppliers who already know tips on how to certify, the regulators, the well being ministers who nonetheless assume we make toys. By itself the know-how is unremarkable. It solely means something in relation to what surrounds it.
Which is roughly what Singapore labored out about its Grand Prix. The circuit is a number of kilometres of extraordinary public highway. Run it previous the airport and it’s a quick automobile on a Sunday. Run it by the center of town after darkish and the world sits up.
The business will get to the bay first subsequent July. The grandstands return up a number of months after it leaves, for a lot the identical motive. You would maintain both of them out at Changi. It simply would not imply very a lot on the market.
ManufacturingIQ’s Daniel O’Connor moderated Industrialising Additive Manufacturing: Expertise, Requirements and Adoption at GAMS 2026.
