President Obama Launches the Advanced Manufactur​ing Partnership

Last week, President Obama visited Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he toured Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) and delivered remarks announcing the launch of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), a $550 million dollar project to bring together industry, government, and higher education.

Today, the President travels to Bettendorf, Iowa, to visit the Davenport Works factory of AMP participant Alcoa. The factory is a state-of-the-art aluminum rolling mill that serves as the manufacturing hub for Alcoa's $3 billion aerospace business. You can watch the event live at 2:05 PM EST on Whitehouse.gov/live.

 

The Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) is a national effort that brings together industry, universities and the federal government to invest in emerging technologies that will create high quality manufacturing jobs and enhance our global competitiveness. As President Obama remarked in Pittsburgh:

“We’ve launched an all-hands-on-deck effort between our brightest academic minds, some of our boldest business leaders, and our most dedicated public servants from science and technology agencies, all with one big goal, and that is a renaissance of American manufacturing. Throughout our history, our greatest breakthroughs have often come from partnerships just like this one.

American innovation has always been sparked by individual scientists and entrepreneurs, often at universities like Carnegie Mellon or Georgia Tech or Berkeley or Stanford. But a lot of companies don’t invest in early ideas because it won’t pay off right away. And that’s where government can step in. That’s how we ended up with some of the world-changing innovations that fueled our growth and prosperity and created countless jobs -- the mobile phone, the Internet, GPS, more than 150 drugs and vaccines over the last 40 years was all because we were able to, in strategic ways, bring people together and make some critical investments.”

The President’s plan, which leverages existing programs and proposals, will invest more than $500 million to jumpstart this effort. These investments will build domestic manufacturing capabilities in critical national security industries and reduce the time needed to make advanced materials used in manufacturing products. Additionally, we will invest in next-generation robotics, increase energy-efficiency in the manufacturing process and develop new technologies that will dramatically reduce the time required to design, build, and test manufactured goods.