Fives AddUp, the additive manufacturing division of France's Fives Group, will begin building its large-format FormUp 750 metal printer in the United States starting in 2027, according to a report from 3D Printing Industry. The industrialization work will happen at Fives Machining Systems Inc.'s (FMSI) existing facility in Hebron, Ohio, marking the company's first domestic manufacturing line for its flagship large-volume laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) platform.
The move doesn't replace Fives AddUp's French operations. Units bound for European customers will continue to be built and assembled in France, while the Hebron line stands up in parallel to serve North American demand. It's a dual-track manufacturing strategy that mirrors a broader trend among European industrial toolmakers: keep the home base running, but stop shipping the biggest, most expensive machines across an ocean when the customer base — and the reshoring pressure — is increasingly domestic.
What the FormUp 750 Actually Is
The FormUp 750 is the big sibling in Fives AddUp's LPBF lineup, scaling up from the established FormUp 350 platform. The 750 expands the build volume to 750 x 750 x 1,000 mm — large enough to print structural parts, tooling, or nested batches of smaller components in a single build. To keep throughput reasonable at that scale, the machine supports up to 12 simultaneous lasers, splitting the build plate into zones that multiple beams can scan in parallel rather than relying on a single laser to raster the entire area.
That laser count matters more than it might look on a spec sheet. Large-format LPBF systems live or die on build time economics: a bigger chamber is only useful if you can actually fill it in a reasonable number of hours. Multi-laser architectures — increasingly common at the high end of the metal AM market — are the industry's answer to that problem, and a 12-laser configuration puts the FormUp 750 near the top of what's commercially available today.
Fives AddUp is pairing the hardware with its existing digital software suite, covering build preparation, production management, in-process monitoring, and traceability. For the aerospace, defense, space, energy, and maritime customers the machine is aimed at, that traceability layer is not optional — parts destined for flight-critical or mission-critical applications typically require full genealogy from powder lot to finished component, and buyers evaluating a machine of this size will be looking as hard at the data trail as at the build volume.
Why Hebron, Why Now
FMSI's Hebron, Ohio site already does machining work for Fives, giving the company an existing industrial footprint, workforce, and supply relationships to build on rather than standing up a greenfield plant. The FormUp 750 line will sit alongside — not inside — Fives AddUp's separate 20,000-square-foot Cincinnati Solution Center, which the company already operates for North American application development and customer demos. Ohio, in other words, is becoming a two-site hub for the business: applications and customer-facing work in Cincinnati, industrial-scale printer manufacturing in Hebron.
Nick Estock, North America CEO of Fives AddUp, tied the announcement directly to reshoring pressure in aerospace and defense manufacturing, a framing that's become standard in this segment over the past couple of years as U.S. primes and their suppliers face contractual and policy pushes to source critical hardware domestically. A separate report from 3D ADEPT Media, which independently confirmed the Hebron location, the 2027 start date, and the machine's specifications, carried a similar message from Matt Shockey, CEO of Fives High Precision Machines North America, who said "by combining leading additive manufacturing technology with local production expertise, we are reinforcing critical supply chains, strengthening domestic capabilities, and bringing advanced metal 3D printing solutions closer to American customers."
Both outlets note that the engineering behind the FormUp 750 remains France-designed — Hebron is where the machines will be industrialized and built, not where the platform originated. That's a common pattern for this kind of reshoring move: the R&D and core engineering stay centralized, while final assembly, and the supply chain qualification that comes with it, moves closer to the end customer.
What It Means for Makers
If you print PLA on a desktop FDM machine, the FormUp 750 will never be a part of your workflow — this is industrial capital equipment aimed at aerospace primes and defense contractors, not hobbyists or even most job shops. But it's still worth tracking for a few reasons.
First, it's a data point on where the metal AM industry's center of gravity is moving. When a European manufacturer builds a domestic production line specifically to serve U.S. aerospace and defense customers, it signals that those customers are demanding — or being required to demand — domestically sourced metal printers, not just domestically printed parts. That has knock-on effects for U.S.-based metal AM machine builders and service bureaus, who now have a more direct European competitor building on American soil rather than shipping finished machines across the Atlantic.
Second, for makers and small manufacturers who do metal 3D printing as a service, machines like the FormUp 750 set the ceiling on what's achievable at scale nearby. A 750 x 750 x 1,000 mm, 12-laser system installed in Ohio means large-format LPBF capacity — and the expertise that comes with operating it — is becoming more accessible regionally, which can matter for anyone trying to source large metal prints without an international supply chain.
Third, the pairing of hardware with a full digital thread for traceability is a reminder of where the bar sits for anyone hoping to sell into aerospace or defense supply chains: monitoring, documentation, and genealogy are table stakes, not add-ons, at this end of the market.
No pricing, unit counts, or hiring numbers were disclosed in either report, and Fives AddUp has not said how output from the Hebron line will be allocated between existing and new customers once industrialization begins in 2027.
