Titanium Sponge Bottleneck!!
Fighter jets & transport aircraft stay in service 30 to 50 years. Restarting a casting or forging line for a handful of units takes up to 18 months.
Additive manufacturing fixes this. Scan the part, qualify the print process, and produce a small batch in days instead of waiting months.
However, a bigger problem sits underneath it. AM still runs on titanium powder & that supply chain has a single point of failure.
The Pentagon is betting on this. FY2026 budget requests $3.3B for AM programs, an 83% jump from last year, largely for sustainment of legacy vehicles.
Norsk Titanium already qualified a titanium AM component for a DoD program in 2024. But the catch is… none of it runs without titanium powder.
China controls 67% of global titanium sponge output, tripled since 2018. Russia’s VSMPO-AVISMA held a third of what’s left outside China, which has been disrupted since 2022.
2025 US tariffs raised titanium powder costs overnight, accelerating DOD-backed domestic production like IperionX’s 10,000-ton target by 2030.
Printing the part in-house means nothing if the metal still crosses a border you don’t control. Supply chain sovereignty depends on where your powder comes from, not where you manufacture.
Spark: Is domestic titanium ready for defense AM sovereignty?
