By

Christopher Mims

Startup Material Hybrid Manufacturing is working to 3-D-print batteries inside SkyRaider drones. Joe Ailinger

There’s a revolution in battery technology hiding in plain sight: The 3-D printing of batteries has the potential to put energy storage inside any device. This will enable lightweight and long-lasting consumer gadgets, long-range military drones and even nanoscale robots.

The way the world manufactures batteries has changed hardly at all in 30 years. Almost all the innovations we regularly hear about—from cheaper, tougher electric-vehicle batteries to “Holy Grail” solid-state batteries—are about changing the chemistry of batteries.

The promise of battery-tech 3-D printing (aka additive manufacturing) is simple: What if batteries could fill any available space, even structural elements of our gadgets, rather than always taking a rigid shape like a pouch or cylinder?

The new approach has obvious appeal. The entire airframe of a drone could be filled with energy storage for increased range. Smartglasses could have sleek battery-packed frames, so they look like everyday eyewear rather than “Revenge of the Nerds” props.

One of the biggest advantages of 3-D printing is that it works with any battery, regardless of its cell chemistry. It could advance today’s lithium-ion as well as emerging sodium-ion and solid-state tech.

A 3-D-printed battery component made from simulated moon dust and astronaut waste. ESTRELLA/The University of Texas at El Paso

In 2025, researchers published around 25,000 papers about 3-D printing of batteries and their components, yet only a handful of startups have even proposed commercializing the technology.

Attempting to beat existing battery giants has doomed many a company to the graveyard. New battery tech must compete on lifespan, durability, energy density, safety and cost—which is dependent on massive scale.

Some are trying to use 3-D printing to create efficiencies in existing battery manufacturing systems. A brave handful of startups are pursuing radical new designs and approaches. They’re starting with defense applications, where cost and scale are less of an issue.

The airspace less traveled

Gabe Elias, chief executive of Miami-based 3-D-printed battery startup Material Hybrid Manufacturing, was an engineer on the Mercedes-AMG Formula One team for six years. During that period, the team won several championships led by driver Lewis Hamilton.

Elias was tasked with figuring out how to squeeze batteries into small and unlikely places—including directly under Hamilton’s seat. He couldn’t do it with existing tech. Years later, he was introduced to Christopher Reyes, who developed a battery printing tech for his doctoral thesis at Duke University, and the two founded the company.

Material's custom-built, hybrid 3-D-printing machine for making batteries. MATERIAL

Material has already 3-D-printed test battery cells in the lab, using a variety of ingredients, to prove the tech works with different chemistries. “Our approach is, instead of innovating on the chemistry side of things, let’s innovate on the way that the batteries are made,” says Elias. “Chemistry innovation is happening all across the industry.” 

Material recently announced a $7.1 million seed investment round and a $1.25 million contract with the U.S. Air Force.

By the end of August, the company plans to hit the next milestone in its Air Force contract by creating prototype batteries for Teledyne Flir’s SkyRaider drone. The drone maker could only cram in four packs of conventional lithium-ion batteries. By printing the batteries into the same space, Elias says the drone could get a 35% increase in energy storage.

A better process

At Silicon Valley-based Sakuu, the approach is more conservative than Material’s, but has the potential to show up in commercial batteries much sooner. Rather than trying to 3-D-print whole batteries, the company is working on replacing one of battery manufacturing’s biggest pain points, says Arwed Niestroj, Sakuu’s chief operating officer, who is also a nuclear physicist and former head of Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America.

Sakuu is developing a dry process for manufacturing electrodes intended to replace a costly industry-standard system. Sakuu

Existing battery assembly lines include football-field-long ovens for drying layers of material that have been dissolved in solvents. This requires a huge amount of energy and is a significant contributor to manufacturing costs, a big reason EV batteries aren’t cheaper.

Sakuu’s process, under development for years, uses additive manufacturing to lay down key battery components without solvents, eliminating the need for ovens, says Niestroj.

Sakuu is currently working to commercialize this tech with a major battery manufacturer—Niestroj didn’t say who, or when those cells would go on the market. Previously, Sakuu said it had a joint development partnership with Korean battery giant SK On to bring this system to market.

Radical designs

The world is full of battery designs that can make traditional lithium-ion look like the D cells in a 1980s boombox. But most are stuck at the laboratory stage.

Alexis Maurel, a researcher at the University of Texas at El Paso, has published fundamental research on this topic. In support of NASA’s push to return to the moon, he proposed a radical technique using lunar regolith—literally, moon dust—to print batteries for future moon bases.

Maurel says it typically takes about 20 years from the conception of a new battery technology to its commercialization. He’s already been at it for 10. But he’s excited by what’s to come: A number of auto manufacturers are hard at work on “structural” batteries, which means the battery pack itself helps hold the vehicle together.

Cylinders within the Wright Electric aluminum-air batteries, which achieve many times the energy storage capacity of traditional lithium-ion. Ben Hertzberg

For Malta, N.Y.-based Wright Electric, 3-D printing was key to enabling the manufacturing of an exotic battery type known as aluminum-air.

Aluminum-air batteries have off-the-charts storage capacity but can’t be recharged. They’re useful for remote military applications, where soldiers can use them to recharge an ever-growing array of electronic devices. (Used packs are either tossed or returned to base to be remanufactured.)

Wright Electric CEO Jeff Engler says his company, like Material, focuses on the military as the best customer for the expensive, still-nascent “ultra high-performance” 3-D-printed batteries.

The drone-centric wars popping up all over mean a need for more lightweight craft like those already in use in Russia, Ukraine and the Strait of Hormuz, says Engler. At the same time, militaries are also seeking ways to maximize space and minimize weight in larger aircraft, he adds.

Long before our consumer gadgets are built with fully customized energy-storing materials, 3-D-printed batteries will evolve in one of history’s most reliable tech incubators: the military.

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Although the results are not yet fully in, it seems likely that Janeese Lewis George will be the next mayor of Washington, D.C. With 65 percent of votes counted as of this writing, Lewis George leads fellow city council member Kenyan McDuffie by 16 percentage points; she may even clear the 50 percent threshold required to avoid a run-off. That’s a decisive conclusion for a race that pitted the more moderate McDuffie against Lewis George, an endorsee and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). If the down-ballot results hold up, last night looks to have been a route for the Left in general, and the DSA in particular.

Assuming she wins, that will make Lewis George yet another DSA member running an important American city. She’ll be added to the list with not just New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, but also Seattle mayor Katie Wilson. There are other aspirants, including most notably council member Nithya Raman, the DSA member who unexpected bested reality star and right-wing insurgent Spencer Pratt to take second place in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. (Raman is unlikely to beat incumbent mayor Karen Bass in the run-off, although the betting markets give her better odds than they gave Pratt.)

These new, openly socialist mayors have a certain allure to more traditional Democrats. With their party’s popularity in the pits, and its leaders increasingly aged, more moderate Dems see the obvious appeal to the hot new force in local politics. The DSA electeds also form their coalition from politically activated Americans under 50—a must-win group among Democrats, but also one increasingly dissatisfied with the party. The fact that some of these mayors have at least nominally leaned into pro-housing YIMBYism makes it all the easier for some on the “abundance” center-left to wonder if they’re better aligned with the socialist than they are with the establishment.

That’s all understandable. But the DSA’s electoral success should not be confused for policy success—much like the establishment Dems they replace, the DSA mayors are confusing class warfare for actual solutions to the affordability crisis. And in embracing them, mainstream Democrats also risk welcoming in an organization that has quietly grown disturbingly radical, a fact that could prove politically disastrous in the long run.

The wave of DSA mayoral candidates—and local candidates more generally—is the product of careful planning. It in part reflects Mamdani’s upset victory over former Governor Andrew Cuomo, which proved that a socialist could win a mayoralty in a city as significant as New York. But it is also the result of a concerted effort on the part of the DSA to establish itself as a separate power center in blue-city politics.

For example, as Michael Lange wrote recently, the New York City DSA has moved to muscle out the city’s unions, embodied in the Working Families Party. That looks like the current primary in New York’s seventh congressional district, which features WFP-backed Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso in a fight for his political life against DSA-backed insurgent Clare Valdez. Mamdani is consciously building his “machine,” New York Magazine’s David Friedlander writes—a machine that includes his “Office of Mass Engagement,” an officially sanctioned activist wing of City Hall.

The DSA’s strategy is built on a distinct electorate. Traditional Democrats—like Bass, Cuomo, McDuffie, and Bruce Harrell, whom Wilson defeated in Seattle—tend to rely on the backing of the institutional Democratic machine to turn out votes. That machine, in turn, often relies on working-class voters activated by unions and by the party’s infrastructure.

The DSA generally has no access to the latter, and is not necessarily influential in the former, though some unions are increasingly divided between traditional and socialist factions. What it has instead is a cohort of thousands of ideologically committed young(ish) adults, willing to knock on doors to get out the vote for its candidates.

DSA candidates’ priorities are often shaped by the concerns of these constituents. Mamdani’s affordability messaging, as Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam has argued, was tailored to the concerns of credentialed but downwardly mobile Millennials—people who feel the city is too expensive to afford them the kind of life they expected. Wilson, Lewis George, and Raman have similarly emphasized housing affordability. At the same time, many of these candidates tell a consistent story about why costs are too high: greed on the part of their cities’ ultra-wealthy, who are unwilling to pay their fair share, and of whom punitive taxation is therefore appropriate.

In spite of this, the DSA’s willingness to seize on the affordability narrative—especially on housing—has made them appealing to the pro-housing “abundance” wing of the Democratic Party. That’s helped by DSA electeds’ and candidates’ willingness to endorse moderate reforms to permitting and other minor barriers to housing—as, for example, in Raman’s platform or Mamdani’s SPEED reforms. Against the sclerosis of the Democratic establishment, an apparent bias for action may make the DSA appealing to more moderate Democrats eager for change.

To be sure, concessions on permitting reform are welcome, no matter whom they come from. But the high cost of living in America’s major metros are not simply the result of minor procedural hurdles, but of a more comprehensive opposition to allowing the market to supply what is demanded. And the DSA’s open hostility toward the people who do the supplying is incompatible with actually existing abundance.

This hostility manifests itself in policy. Mamdani’s administration has worked to seize property from landlords while pushing the city’s business community out. Lewis George has promised to strengthen D.C.’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, which gives tenants the right of first refusal to purchase—and which has helped cripple the city’s housing market. Wilson has dismissed millionaires fleeing Seattle—even as they are taking with them the tax base needed to sustain her promised expansion of government—and “abundant” construction using union-built social housing. Raman has taken meaningful steps toward reform, like pushing to fix Measure ULA, but she also emphasizes the need for new housing to be built by “well-paid union labor”—a dogwhistle for preserving prevailing wage standards.

This ideological posturing can have real economic consequences. Permitting reform can only get you so far if investment dries up and no one wants to build for fear that their property will be seized in a questionably constitutional taking. Cities are subject to exit-based vetoes—scaring off talent and capital risks killing the golden goose.

Even if they weren’t so explicitly appropriative, these mayors would still be hemmed in by their unwillingness to target ideologically inconvenient cost drivers. As my colleague Eric Kober has written, Mamdani’s housing aspirations are limited by his unwillingness to attack destructive policies like Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, the requirement that “a sizable percentage of units in new buildings in rezoned areas be offered at below-market rents.” Raman and Wilson’s nods to union-built housing similarly indicate that they still feel beholden to organized labor—a major driver of housing costs.

At its best, DSA YIMBYism gives with one hand while taking with the other. That’s a political strategy that’s palatable to their voters, but it’s not one that gets at the root causes of our affordability crisis, which is government’s comprehensive chokehold on the private sector.

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But the biggest question about the rise of the DSA mayors is not so much their approach to policy as it is the organization with which they are aligned. In 2020, many moderate Democrats found themselves in rooms with true radicals—people who had for years pushed police and prison abolition, and who took the opportunity to advance their goals when the time came. Making bedfellows with the DSA today runs the risk of the same dynamic emerging in the Democratic party tomorrow.

To be sure, Mamdani has tried to present a more moderate image in office. But other DSA electeds are not so circumspect. As my colleague Stu Smith has reported, DSA members in other local positions have been quite open in their willingness to use public office to advance their political interests, including rerouting public funds to activist-led “mutual aid” efforts and picking fights with Democrats to their right.

Meanwhile, the national DSA—the group with which all these mayors are ultimately affiliated—has veered further and further into extremism. As Smith has reported, the DSA just passed a platform that calls for abolishing the Department of War and “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state” among other policy initiatives. It has also begun building a “self-defense” wing in part charged with preparing for a “national uprising,” and put a pro-political violence self-identified Maoist on the committee in charge of that effort. And it’s increasingly found common cause with groups likely funded by the Chinese Communist Party, and worked to advance the interests of the regime in Cuba.

Not every member of the DSA endorses these priorities, of course. But that supporters of political violence and sympathists for hostile foreign powers hold sway in the DSA’s institutional infrastructure is a reason to ask: are these really the sort of people to get in bed with?

One of the worst habits of the respectable liberal is to see in the far-left ideologue something admirable, however disagreeable. The center-left’s flirtation with DSA politics is not new; it is a repetition of an age-old pattern in American political life. Historically, Democrats embrace of radical Leftism has ended not in bold change, but electoral tears. But maybe this time will be different.

No surprise, Sunday’s article about 10 possible fixes for American healthcare sparked lots of reader suggestions, from minor to radical. I may run a second list with your ideas (or host a chat to discuss the issue).

But I was struck by how many of you pushed one seemingly simple change: requiring open pricing for medical procedures, services, and drugs whenever possible. This suggestion came up more than any other, even restricting drug advertising.

I agree. Open pricing may seem like a small change, but in fact it would have major philosophical and practical benefits.

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Our $5 trillion system encourages consumers, aka patients, to think of care as free — while setting up a maze of hidden financial incentives and honeypots that providers and administrators spend huge amounts of time navigating and fighting over.

Pretending medicine isn’t about money hasn’t made medicine less about money. It has just distorted the system in deeply destructive ways.

Even if doctors do not let financial incentives drive treatment decisions for individual patients (and some clearly do), profit drives every structural decision in American medicine, from where hospitals open satellite clinics to the drugs pharmacy benefits managers push to how quickly patients are discharged.

The list is endless.

Yet at the most crucial point of contact, we simply hide the price of treatments. Among other distortions, this fiction encourages patients to overconsume medical services. We implicitly assume we do not need to discourage people from seeking out healthcare. We imagine most healthy people will not go to doctors if they do not have to, so we do not have to regulate access to care.

But in the United States in 2026, that assumption no longer seems to hold.

We have an ever-increasing number of chronic conditions, often driven by unhealthy lifestyle choices, as well "sort-of" diseases with a strong psychosocial component. Drug company advertising fuels patient demand for the costliest possible treatments for all these conditions. (To a lesser extent, so does hospital and physician group advertising.) Under the circumstances, even completely healthy people may feel almost compelled to use the system, if only because they pay so much into it and get nothing back.

Meanwhile, the lack of open pricing discourages competition on price (obviously). This cartel-like behavior is particularly harmful because many procedures, particularly imaging and blood testing, have very low marginal costs. And routine imaging doesn’t always require expensive new equipment. Cheaper, older machines can deliver more than adequate results.1

In other words, independent providers may have more flexibility on price than patients (or even they) realize, especially for cash payors where insurance overhead isn’t a major cost.

As one reader wrote:

An absolutely crucial fact--that almost no one with conventional insurance even realizes--is that most day-to-day, routine medical tests, procedures, and drugs are very inexpensive. That's especially so in markets like Las Vegas, where I live, where there are many cash-pay customers. A chest X-ray is $23; a standard MRI is about $125; I had a CT scan 2 weeks ago that cost $103…

Of course, there are any number of conditions, medical emergencies, and specialized drugs that are astronomically expensive--that's why we all need some form of catastrophic insurance. But for the day-to-day, routine stuff, the less any 3rd party (insurance company, employer's benefits manager, government, hospital corporation) is involved, the better off everyone is.

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And so we should require transparent pricing for a broad array of routine services — in doctors’ offices, in outpatient and urgent care facilities, in testing labs, even in hospitals where possible. Doing so will encourage price competition. It may also convince some people to start paying for routine services themselves and switch to higher-deductible insurance plans.

Most importantly, it will encourage people to think of routine medical care as simply another service — and help restore their agency over not just health, but the healthcare they consume.

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Another reader put the problem — and the solution — in a larger context:

The core problem in American healthcare is not simply cost. It is complexity, and more importantly, the velocity of complexity.

Rules, reimbursement structures, compliance requirements, coding systems, network rules, and incentive structures change so rapidly that only very large institutions can realistically keep up. Hospitals, insurers, private equity groups, pharmaceutical companies, and large regulatory/compliance infrastructures adapt because they have armies of administrators and lawyers. Independent physicians and patients cannot.

That instability itself becomes a mechanism of control.

Direct physician-patient relationships, transparent pricing, and simple market feedback become harder and harder to sustain because the system is constantly shifting underneath everyone. The result is opacity. And opacity is where fraud, waste, abuse, and rent-seeking thrive.

The public can understand simple ideas:

* transparent pricing,

* aligned incentives,

* direct accountability,

* same rules for everyone,

* and reducing unnecessary intermediaries.

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Implementing four out of those five suggestions would require massive structural changes that are essentially politically impossible in the current system.

But transparent pricing? That’s hard to argue against. That’s at least theoretically possible.

And maybe moving towards it will eventually help drive the rest.

First things first: One week to Father’s Day. I’ll have more to say about THE FATHERHOOD MANIFESTO soon. Your emails have been very supportive, and the great reviews keep pouring in on Amazon.

So don’t wait. Get your copy now, in time for Father’s Day!

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American medicine is a $5 trillion mess that eats anyone who tries to fix it (the knives are now out for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.).

But our healthcare doesn’t have to be this bad. I woke up thinking of 10 ways to improve it. (Yes, this is actually what I woke up this Sunday morning thinking about. I know, I need more hobbies.)

The first two are probably the most popular politically — and the least likely ever to go anywhere. But even the simplest of these would face huge political and economic obstacles. Still, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try for them.

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So, without further ado, here are 10 changes I’d make to the healthcare leviathan if I were in charge:

1: Break up local health care monopolies and oligopolies, particularly the “nonprofit” regional and academic hospital systems that have grown spiderwebs around nearly every metro area. Set strict limits on local concentration, recognizing that nearly all health care is delivered locally.

2: Set windfall salary taxes on executives at those systems. These hospitals pay no taxes. They are supposed to serve the public interest, not their executives. If they want to receive the benefits of ordinary charities, they should run like charities.

3: Move to the Danish vaccine schedule for children. Most importantly, end the recommendation for universal Hepatitis B shots at birth. Vaccinations are not public health theater and shouldn’t be treated that way. If a child isn’t at reasonable risk for contracting an illness she shouldn’t have to be vaccinated against it because other children are.

4: Prevent pharmaceutical companies from profiting from any medicine sold under the Food and Drug Administration’s “accelerated approval” program — that is, without proof of clinical benefit. In general, I think accelerated approval is a mistake. “Surrogate endpoints” like changes in the amount of protein a cell produces may or may not actually help a patient feel better or live longer, the changes that actually matter.

But if we are going to allow accelerated approvals, we have to force drug companies to follow through by producing real data proving those benefits. And pharma companies have shown they will drag their feet as long as they are making money from a drug sold under the accelerated program.

5: Begin a long-term program of funding placebo-controlled clinical trials to determine if common minor surgeries are helpful compared to rehabilitation, rest, and waiting. It’s more than surgery for meniscal tears — many surgeries have much weaker clinical evidence than people realize.

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6: End all gain-of-function research designed to increase viral or bacteria transmissibility or dangerousness. Propose an international agreement making all such research a crime against humanity. Covid proved the risks of such research.

Beyond that, Covid revealed the fatal flaws in the theory (propounded by virologists, of course) that virologists need to run such research to determine the dangers of newly emerging viruses. After all, they didn’t predict Covid, or any of the evolutionary pathways it took. We cannot predict how pathogens will evolve in the wild, only respond to them when they do.

Setting a bright line on this issue is particularly important at a time when artificial intelligence tools may give private and non-state researchers a greater ability to pursue gain-of-function research.

If such research must be conducted at all, it should be run in a handful of government-run labs worldwide — no more than one in any country — that are internationally supervised.

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7: End insurance parity between mental health and physical health conditions (except for psychiatric drug treatments that have randomized controlled trial evidence supporting them). I know this one will be very controversial with many of you.

But we have next to no evidence that mental health care works, and the nebulousness of these conditions allows the creation of expensive honeypots like autism behavioral therapy.

8: At a minimum, sharply cut back on drug addiction rehab coverage, which is incredibly expensive, fails to reduce addiction or relapse when it is tested, and actually encourages unscrupulous operators and companies to recycle addicts through programs to survive. Insurance companies should be required to provide one 30- to 60-day rehab every five years; after that the addict or his family is responsible for covering the cost.

9: Allow insurance companies to create and sell inexpensive, high-deductible health insurance products — true catastrophic insurance. This would return health insurance to its roots and make it more like other insurance products; your home insurance covers serious damage to your house, not fixing a faucet.

10: End medical aid in dying programs. When a patient has days or weeks left with a terminal illness, the difference between pain control and hastening life’s end can be impossible to distinguish. (Even then, physicians should be cautious.) Outside of that boundary, doctors should not be in the euthanasia business. The experience of Canada, Belgium, and other countries shows these programs inevitably metastasize.

If people are too afraid to kill themselves to do so without a doctor’s help to make the process effortless and painless, they probably shouldn’t be killing themselves. And doctors — who are in the business of healing —- should not be helping them.

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(Whew! That was 10! Reward yourself for getting to the end with a subscription.)

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So. At least for today, Those are my Top 10 American Healthcare Fixes (TM).

Looking forward to hearing what you think of them — and your own suggestions.