Hyliion showcases GE Aerospace M-Line to scale 3D-printed generators

Four independent lasers are turning Hyliion’s generator parts from a slow additive job into a production workflow with real throughput. Thomas Healy’s showcase of GE Aerospace’s M Line centered on a machine that Hyliion said can produce two to four times more parts per printer than the systems it had been using for KARNO generators.

Hyliion said its first M Line arrived from Colibrium Additive in January 2025, making it the first M Line deployment in the United States. The company had already installed an X Line 2000R from Colibrium Additive in April 2024, then ordered additional M Line systems for delivery throughout 2025 as it pushed to scale generator production for data centers, microgrids, EV charging, backup power and other energy infrastructure uses.

The machine itself is the point. Colibrium Additive lists the M Line as a modular laser powder bed fusion platform with a build volume of 500 x 500 x up to 400 mm and configurations that use either 4 x 400W fiber lasers or 4 x 1 kW fiber lasers. Compared with a single-laser system, four independent lasers can spread work across the bed and keep more of the build chamber productive at once, which is how one machine starts to look less like a prototyping tool and more like a serial-production cell. Colibrium Additive’s published figures put the quad-laser system at 45 cm3/h for AlSi7Mg and 75 cm3/h for Ti6Al4V, and its modular architecture separates the Laser Processing System from the Material Handling Station so production tasks can run in parallel.

That matters because KARNO is not a one-off demo part. Hyliion says the platform is designed to operate on more than 20 fuels, including natural gas, hydrogen, propane, diesel and ammonia, and it demonstrated uninterrupted multi-fuel operation on November 11, 2024. By early 2025, Hyliion said it had commitments for more than 100 KARNO generators, a letter of intent with a leading data center developer for up to 70 megawatts of generating capacity, and delivery of its first Early Adopter Customer Unit.

GE Aviation had already made the broader industrial bet in 2021, when it acquired five M Line systems, four for West Chester, Ohio and one for Turin, Italy. Hyliion’s move shows where printer performance is heading next: not just bigger chambers, but more beams, less idle time and economics built for actual factory output.