Global AM market hit $4.5 billion in Q2 2026, up 12% year over year
AM Research’s quarterly tracking data puts the global additive manufacturing market at $4.5 billion for Q2 2026, up 12% from the same quarter a year earlier and up from $4.4 billion in Q1 2026. The figures come from the firm’s 3DP/AM Market Insights: Q2 2026 dataset, which covers metal, polymer, and ceramic printing across printers, materials, and services.
Polymer is still the bigger segment at $2.68 billion, up from $2.42 billion in Q2 2025 (roughly 10.7% growth). Metal came in smaller at $1.81 billion but grew faster, up from $1.59 billion (roughly 13.8%). Ceramics is folded into the total with no standalone number disclosed.
Scott Dunham, Executive Vice President at AM Research, called the first half of 2026 a “welcome time” for the industry and said some capital had started returning to the sector. That’s a characterization from a firm that sells subscriptions to this same tracking data, so take the warmth with a grain of salt.
The more interesting number in the report is services: $2.50 billion, up from $2.19 billion a year ago, a gain of about 14%. That figure appears to sit inside the metal and polymer totals rather than add to them, and the report doesn’t define what counts as a service transaction versus a hardware one, so it’s not clear how much of the quarter’s growth is parts and capacity bought from a vendor versus printers sold.
The Wohlers Report 2026, from Wohlers Associates and ASTM International, found services grew 15.5% in 2025 and now make up 48% of the $24.2 billion global AM revenue, while printer sales grew just 3.6%. That’s a different dataset on a different time scale (annual, not quarterly), and AM Research doesn’t define services the same way Wohlers does, so the two numbers can’t be added or compared directly. The resemblance between a 14% services gain in AM Research’s quarter and a 15.5% services gain in Wohlers’ year is suggestive, not proof of the same mechanism. Reading AM Research’s metal and polymer growth rates against that resemblance doesn’t actually support a hardware-is-flat story either: metal, the segment most exposed to equipment purchases, grew 13.8%, faster than the 12% headline. There isn’t a way to isolate hardware-only revenue from the figures AM Research published this quarter.
Dunham flagged the capex risk directly, warning it “remains to be seen” whether the sector stalls again as pressured by interest rates, something AM Research says it’s seen before, or whether AM keeps growing as manufacturers use it to handle shifting market conditions. That’s Dunham’s framing for why services might outpace hardware in a downturn, not a mechanism this report’s numbers demonstrate. AMPOWER reported the industrial AM market stagnated in 2024 before returning to 5.6% growth in 2025, which is at least consistent with capex cycles affecting the sector before, even if this quarter’s segment data doesn’t show it happening again.
The vendor list AM Research tracks for this dataset is broad: 3D Systems, Stratasys, HP, EOS, Formlabs, Bambu Lab, Nikon SLM Solutions, Colibrium Additive, Carbon, Markforged, Farsoon, BLT, Creality, Renishaw, Prodways, ARC Impact, Velo3D, Optomec, BeAM, Eplus, and Atlix, among others, segmented by print technology, geography, and application.