Carolina Cluster: 3D Printing Integral to Savannah River National Laboratory’s New Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative

The story of manufacturing unfolds in hubs, and in the U.S. since the aftermath of World War Two, federally-funded national laboratories have played a major role in helping those hubs develop and thrive. Sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE), this network of seventeen national laboratories has been a continuous catalyst behind R&D into the world’s most complex engineering topics, especially those related to nuclear power.

The latest chapter in this history of innovation involves South Carolina’s Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), which just opened a 60,000 square foot, $50 million site on the University of South Carolina (USC) Aiken campus, called the Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative (AMC). Additive manufacturing (AM) will be among the technologies featured at the AMC, with nuclear fusion and AI also at the top of the new facility’s agenda.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, along with multiple members of the South Carolina congressional delegation, joined the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the AMC that took place on August 7. At the ceremony, Wright framed the AMC as part of a regional emerging technology cluster akin to Silicon Valley, and suggested that the site could make key future contributions to the U.S. data center landscape.

South Carolina may indeed evolve into something of a capital of data center hardware 3D printing. In addition to the AMC, data center infrastructure supplier AIRSYS, headquartered in South Carolina, recently opened a $40 million facility that the company referred to as “the world’s largest” 3D printing factory. And, in a recent interview with Scott Green of 3D Systems — also headquartered in South Carolina — Green explained to me the many reasons why he views data center hardware as one of the biggest new opportunities for AM demand growth.

Regarding the opening of the Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative on the USC Aiken campus, the Laboratory Director of the SRNL, Dr. Johney Green, told the Aiken Standard, “We’ll be working with academia and private sector partners to look at automation, [AM], artificial intelligence and chemical separations to advance these technologies…we hope it’s a great economic engine for this area and a great beacon for our innovation for the region.”

South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson said, “The opening of this facility is a success story of how the government, private sector, and institutions of higher education can come together to drive meaningful innovation and opportunities for the community and nation. I am grateful to represent the Savannah River Site and its workforce and will continue to work with President Trump, Energy Secretary Wright, Congress, and local leaders to invigorate the nuclear industrial base at the site and support peace through strength.”

A recently-published AM Research report argues that the data center market represents an “exponential” growth opportunity for metal AM hardware sales through 2033. The role of AM in the nuclear energy space also continues to gain increasing traction, a trend driven not least of all by the U.S. national laboratories.

What’s most intriguing about the AMC is that it seems to be acknowledging precisely the opportunities  for synergy between AI/data centers, nuclear energy, and advanced manufacturing. New data center construction responding to the AI boom is the primary driver behind resurgent interest in nuclear energy in the U.S. and other similarly industrialized nations. Moreover, increased uptake of advanced manufacturing processes is more or less a prerequisite for success at the reshoring efforts needed to support — among other things — the growing needs for new infrastructure involved in the data center industry.

These are exactly the sorts of interdependent trajectories that can sustain the expansion of an industrial cluster, and industrial clusters are something that the states in the southeastern U.S., and the Carolinas in particular, do quite well. From the opposite angle, in the same way that 3D printing is bolstering the vitality of a manufacturing hub, the hub should give the AM industry some much-needed momentum at a time when the overall business environment largely remains in a standstill, as businesses await the appearance of any clarity at all vis-a-vis the Trump administration’s trade policies.

Manufacturing phase-changes demand society-wide efforts, ones that entail strategic alignment between decision-makers from several different spheres. Slowly but surely, that strategic alignment appears to be solidifying, if only, thus far, in certain locales across the globe.