The warehouse in the photo belongs to Walmart, and its gray, unremarkable exterior conceals a fascinating technological story.
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American retail giant Walmart recently joined the trillion-dollar club, becoming the first retailer ever to reach that valuation.
The COVID-19 pandemic was good for business, and the company invested enormous effort in e-commerce and its delivery infrastructure. Today, its stores have evolved into shipping and distribution hubs alongside their traditional retail function.
A store where customers roam the aisles filling shopping carts can't double as a warehouse, so the two functions are kept separate. Each major location is paired with an adjacent space that serves as a logistics warehouse, with shipments dispatched directly from there to a waiting fleet of trucks.
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More than 12 of these warehouses have recently been built using 3D printers — one of them is pictured here.
This is a significant milestone, proving that 3D-printed construction is no longer an expensive experiment but a legitimate, economically viable commercial process. The method is likely to gain rapid momentum in the near future.
Traditionally, 3D concrete printing has suffered from significant drawbacks.
Roofs cannot be printed in concrete — only walls. Printing must be carried out at temperatures that aren't too high, to prevent the concrete from hardening before steel reinforcement is inserted. The printers themselves were cumbersome, and the printing material was more expensive than conventional concrete.
Walmart's projects use smart printers equipped with flexible robotic arms that move along tracks, and printing is scheduled for nighttime when daytime temperatures are too high.
The concrete is indeed more expensive, but the labor required to operate the machines is negligible compared to conventional construction — and a shortage of construction workers is driving up building costs, narrowing the price gap.
Walmart also operates at a scale where compressing construction time from several weeks to just a few days carries real economic value, since it allows a building to be put into use sooner. That advantage compounds when you're working through a pipeline of projects rather than a single build.
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Around the world, the construction printing sector is gaining momentum, with Dubai leading the way through regulations that strongly incentivize 3D-printed buildings.
Using the right printing material can significantly reduce a structure's greenhouse gas emissions, and substantial research effort is being invested in developing geopolymers derived from industrial waste streams, as an alternative to the polluting production of conventional building materials.
3D printing also enables the design of partially hollow walls, making structures lighter and reducing material consumption. On top of that, the need for timber formwork is eliminated, and virtually no leftover material accumulates as construction waste.
Now that building printing has become economically attractive — not just ecologically — it seems the path to widespread adoption of this technology is short, and it will be reaching all of us soon.
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👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss — follow me for more content on science and technology.