Amazon is acquiring a majority stake in Shapeways, a world-leading provider of B2B and B2C 3D printing services.
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Apr. 1, 2018– Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that it has acquired a controlling stake in Shapeways, a leading global provider of 3D printing and additive manufacturing services. The unprecedented move from AWS, represent’s the first venture into physical services for Amazon’s cloud platform. Shapeways will leverage the breadth and depth of AWS services—including machine learning, analytics, databases, and containers—to innovate faster than ever before and to meet the needs of its customer growth around the world. AWS will enable Shapeways to accelerate the delivery of its products and services, and easily deploy them globally in minutes, to its customers worldwide.
Shapeways has been an active adopter of containerized applications, and will now leverage AWS’s Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS). This fully managed service will allow Shapeways to run its many Kubernetes workloads on AWS without change, since Amazon EKS is fully compatible with any standard Kubernetes environment.
This acquisition shouldn’t surprise people…as Amazon is already the leader in Print On Demand books. Is this another industry Amazon will conquer?
