This is what maturity looks like. Not the headlines from a decade ago promising a printer in every home. Not the democratization of manufacturing we were told was coming. Just a major company quietly using 3D printing because it’s the best tool for a specific job.

What we’re talking about

Let me back up. 3D printing builds objects layer by layer from digital files. Unlike traditional manufacturing that cuts away material (like machining) or pours it into molds (like injection molding), 3D printing adds material only where it’s needed. Think of it like a very precise glue gun that follows computer instructions.

The technology has been around since the 1980s for industrial prototyping. But around 2010, key patents expired, prices dropped, and suddenly desktop versions became available. That’s when things got interesting. And overhyped.

The 2015 peak

As a student of industrial design engineering, I was deep into 3D printing around 2015. I spent countless hours with these machines, and I wasn’t alone. That year marked the peak of inflated expectations. The narrative was simple: soon, everyone would design and print their own products at home. Need a phone case? Print it. Want custom kitchenware? Print it. Broken part? Just print a replacement.

CES 2015 was the high-water mark. 3D Systems brought Will.i.am on stage as their Chief Creative Officer. Companies showcased chocolate printers and ultra-cheap resin machines. The tech press declared we’d all own 3D printers as commonly as microwaves.

What actually happened? Most of those consumer-focused companies stumbled or pivoted. MakerBot, which had led the consumer charge since 2009, struggled with quality issues and eventually shifted focus. The home 3D printer revolution never arrived.

But something more interesting happened instead.

Where it actually works

The iPhone Air port isn’t an isolated case. McLaren’s Formula 1 team now produces over 9,000 parts per year using 3D printing. Wind tunnel models, aerodynamic components, even tooling for carbon fiber layup. They’ve cut production time for certain large parts from weeks to three days. When you’re racing and every second counts, that speed matters more than any cost savings.

This is rapid prototyping at its finest. Need to test five different wing designs before the next race? Print them all this week. Traditional machining or molding would take months and cost far more.

For one-off designs and low-volume manufacturing, 3D printing has proven itself reliable. Medical devices, custom aerospace components, specialized industrial parts, these aren’t gimmicks. They’re production-ready applications where the technology genuinely shines.

I believe this represents 3D printing’s actual strength: not replacing traditional manufacturing, but filling specific gaps where traditional methods are too slow, too expensive, or geometrically impossible.

The consumer reality check

Walk around Etsy today and you’ll find a thriving ecosystem of makers selling 3D-printed products. Custom phone stands, articulated dragons, board game organizers, plant markers. Some sellers have built real businesses here. But most people don’t have a printer at home. And if they do, they print little plaything gadgets.

We’re far from the original promise. Remember the vision? You’d browse a marketplace like Nike’s, pick a shoe design, input your exact foot measurements for a perfect fit, customize the colors and support structure for your running style, and print that unique pair at home overnight. Your shoes, designed for your feet, impossible to manufacture any other way.

Why is that? Because there are still so many layers of work in-between thinking of an idea, and making it. You need to articulate your idea, measure it, CAD design it, mechanically design it, and manage to print it.

And also, that is really not the point I think of 3D printing. More pragmatically, 3D is another manufacturing technology, slowly becoming also a viable one. To create unique complicated to manufacture components.

Where we’re now instead is much more industrial, and much more practical. Apple using 3D printing to make a thinner port. McLaren using it to iterate faster. Medical companies using it to custom-fit devices. These are real improvements, just not the radical transformations we were promised.

Not democratization, but another tool

The 3D printing revolution was about the democratization of manufacturing. It has become a tool in the arsenal of manufacturing techniques we have available. Like injection molding for high-volume plastic parts. Like CNC milling for precise metal components. Like casting for complex shapes. Each has its place.

3D printing’s place? One-off designs, rapid prototyping, low-volume manufacturing, and geometries that would be difficult or impossible with other methods. That’s valuable. That’s worth the decades of development. It’s just not the revolution we imagined.

The GenAI Question

The biggest question facing 3D printing now is whether generative AI will finally bridge that barrier between idea and object.

Can AI tools make it as simple as describing what you want in plain English and getting a printable file? Some early experiments suggest yes. But I’m curious more than convinced. The gap between “AI can generate a rough 3D model” and “AI can generate a structurally sound, printable, functional object with proper tolerances” is significant.

If genAI does crack this problem, if it becomes as easy to create a custom 3D object as it is to generate an image with DALL-E, then maybe we’ll see a second wave of consumer 3D printing. A more realistic one, focused on truly custom objects that make sense to print rather than everything.

For now, I’m watching. The technology for making things is getting simpler. The software layer is the remaining bottleneck. Whether AI solves that remains to be seen.

What I take from this

Ten years after the hype peak, 3D printing has found its place. It’s in Apple’s manufacturing process. It’s on McLaren’s pit wall. It’s in medical device companies and aerospace manufacturers. It’s on Etsy shops run by makers who learned the tools and found profitable niches.

It’s not in most homes. It probably never will be, at least not as a general-purpose manufacturing tool. And I think we’re better off for having realistic expectations.

The lesson, for me, isn’t about 3D printing specifically. It’s about how new manufacturing technologies actually get adopted. They don’t replace everything that came before. They find specific problems they solve better than existing tools. They mature slowly. They integrate quietly into supply chains and workflows. And then one day, without much fanfare, they’re making the USB-C port in your phone.

Cloud is the iron beneath our software. The servers, hard drives, and network cables that physically deliver the bits and bytes that keep our businesses running. To consumers cloud is vaguely known as that magical infinite storage bucket for photos and Netflix content, yet for almost all businesses nowadays, cloud is also a critical piece of infrastructure to keep things running. Business processes, customer support, websites, apps, and what not.

This infrastructure works much like our roads and highways. A system of not just roads, but also gas stations, parking lots. A system of servers, storage, networking, CPUs and GPUs. And just like highways, cloud infrastructure requires enormous investment to build and maintain.

For years, we became used to the idea of a handful of US tech giants dominating this infrastructure. They had first-mover advantage. They had scale. They had capital. The strategy was simple: bigger, better, faster. More data centers. More regions. More services. Build infrastructure everywhere so any app can scale instantly anywhere on the planet. And Europe fell behind. It tried to respond through regulation. GDPR, data protection, sovereignty requirements. Important, but not at all sexy. A stick to threaten with, not a carrot.

Enter Lidl. A discount grocery chain.

Lidl’s gamble

In 2018, Schwarz Group, the company that owns Lidl and Kaufland, faced a decision about their cloud infrastructure. They were managing 575,000 employees across 13,700 stores in 33 countries. Mountains of operational data. Customer loyalty programs. Supply chain logistics. Employee records.

The obvious move was AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Instead, they decided to build their own.

Why? Partly because US cloud providers operate under US law, creating genuine legal exposure for European companies under GDPR. But also because at their scale, the business case for owning infrastructure made sense. Only a company the size and complexity of Schwarz Group could justify that investment.

They built StackIT. And it worked. And a year ago, in September 2024, they spun it out as a commercial cloud provider, taking a leaf out of Amazon’s 2007 playbook that ultimately let to AWS.

And here’s the thing: it’s working.

SAP signed up. Bayern Munich signed up. The Port of Hamburg signed up. These aren’t startups looking for cheap hosting. These are major organizations choosing StackIT over the US hyperscalers. Amazon also noticed, and responded with a € 7.8 billion investment in “AWS European Sovereign Cloud”.

Now the question isn’t whether this is working (it clearly is). The question is how and what does it mean?

The business case shift

The hardware and software powering the datacenter operations has seen a dramatic leap in commoditisation. Price of ever powerful servers and harddrive storage has continued to come down. And software like OpenStack to manage this hardware has emerged as a reliable backbone for cloud providers.

That shift has changed the business case for data centres. Yes they still require massive amounts of investment, and massive amounts of operational costs. But the numbers are no longer insurmountable, in order to provide a reliable service. That has made it possible for Lidl to build the business case to invest and build StackIT.

And that sheds light on a different strategic consideration; is bigger always better?

Is bigger always better?

StackIT operates data centres only in Germany and Austria (for now). That is a big difference to the Amazon’s and Google’s of the world, selling ‘edge computing’ (servers globally available, instantly serving customers close by).

If you’re a German bank, a Dutch healthcare provider, or a French government agency; do you actually need data centres in Singapore, Sydney and São Paulo? I think not.

Most European businesses serve primarily European customers. Global distribution is not a feature. It is irrelevant complexity. And that just might turn out to be one of the hyperscaler’s Achilles’ heels. All that cloud scalability brings complexity.

StackIT strikes me as being more down to earth. Asking what do businesses actually need? And since cloud as a concept has become a sort of no-brainer for businesses, the actual requirements for it are also clear. Data in Europe. Full GDPR compliance. Reliable performance. Fair pricing. Good developer tooling. And maybe most importantly; no vendor lock-in. That means that a business with a no-nonsense, down-to-earth value proposition, would actually stand a good chance.

The European pattern

StackIT fits a broader pattern I’ve been noticing.

I see certain European technology companies succeeding by flying completely under the radar. Hetzner, the German hosting company with a developer cult following. Proton Mail, the Swiss email service becoming a serious Gmail alternative. OVH and Scaleway in France. Dozens of European VPS providers. These companies share a philosophy: deliver good service at fair prices. Largely skip the marketing theater (I mean, just look at their websites).

This is a distinctly un-Silicon Valley approach. And I think it just might work for European customers. More down-to-earthness. And it looks to me StackIT is this philosophy at enterprise scale.

StackIT didn’t emerge because some founder had a vision. It emerged because a company faced a real problem (where do we put our data?), built a solution methodically, and realized others had the same problem. And StackIT didn’t succeed because of European regulation. Its value proposition on its own is strong enough. GDPR is just a helping hand in pushing customers to look for European alternatives.

This might be how European innovation actually works: slower to emerge, less hyped, solving genuine problems with sustainable models when real need meets real opportunity.

What I’m watching for

I’m watching whether this represents the beginning of a European cloud resurgence. A rethinking of what we actually need from our servers. And potentially a shift away from the traditional cloud platforms with their lock-in services. A simplification, and re-embracing of good old European servers. Whether running on VPS (virtual private servers), or on larger (EU) cloud providers like StackIT.

And I’m curious to see what other European companies might follow this playbook. What other foundational tech has changed to shift the business cases around. And what other tech can be productised by European businesses, to serve other European businesses.

And I’m watching whether we’re seeing a return to practical, down-to-earth business thinking more broadly. Less “change the world” aspiration, more “solve real problems well at fair prices.”