Hey everyone, Mark here.
It has been a wild few days since we launched the Giga 800. Between the emails, the early adopter applications, and seeing the community's reaction to a 3kg-per-hour machine, I haven't slept much. But before the new week officially kicks in, I wanted to talk directly to you about something that’s been dominating the conversation in our industry right now.
If you've spent more than five minutes on X or Reddit lately, you’ve seen the spirited discussions about Bambu Lab's cease-and-desist letter to Orca Slicer over cloud connectivity workarounds, as well as the dearth of American brands in the sub-$10k 3D printing space (at least on the FDM side, since Formlabs seems to be doing great with photopolymers and SLS). Lately, the debate about where a 3D printer is made has gotten incredibly heated, often turning a very complex global supply chain into a simple "us versus them" argument. I get the anxiety. When people argue about where a tool is made, they’re usually expressing a deeper worry about security, economic stability, and control. As someone who has spent his entire adult life bridging different worlds, let’s find our way together.
My journey is a bit of a hybrid. I was born in Taiwan and moved to the US when I was a teenager. I am an American citizen, and I have been working in the 3D printing industry since 2016, starting Peopoly and then Siraya Tech. I have spent the majority of my life in the US where my family lives, and I have also gotten to know Shenzhen very well, just as many hardware founders from around the world do. I met Zack Smith, co-founder of MakerBot, and David Cranor, co-founder of Formlabs and saw firsthand how a global approach to hardware accelerates innovation at HAX Shenzhen. I saw the same passion and drive from talented engineers and scientists when I attended AMUG in March 2026. We have strong manufacturing bases from coast to coast, filled with innovators and builders with fresh ideas.
To thrive, these builders need better tools, lower operating costs, and robust data security to protect their intellectual property. By empowering builders with cost-effective, high-performance, and completely secure equipment, we enable them to create more, scale faster, and ultimately strengthen our local manufacturing economy.
This is exactly why Peopoly launched the Giga 800. We built this FGF printer not only to break the previously high costs of pellet printing technology, but also to add advanced features like active retraction and pressure advance from FDM to FGF that require deep innovation in both hardware and software. We also draw a hard line on data sovereignty. We built the Giga 800 to operate on a true Zero-Trust architecture where you can fully audit the firmware via open source code. It is fully Air-Gap ready, meaning it can operate 100% offline. Whether you are an agile design studio, a print farm, or a defense contractor handling ITAR-compliant projects, your proprietary CAD data never leaves your facility. There is no forced telemetry and no mandatory cloud tethering.
We could not have achieved our feature set, data security, or cost target without open-source software like Klipper and Orca Slicer, paired with the hardware ecosystem of Shenzhen. Peopoly will open-source Giga 800 Klipper firmware as it did with the Magneto X printer. This product development approach shouldn't just be for the Giga 800, but for other printers as well. It is about making the most efficient use of global resources to enable builders around the world to further create and innovate locally. The supply chain may rely on Shenzhen currently, and elsewhere in a few years.
The goal of 3D printing has never been about building walls around where our tools are forged. It is about giving you the freedom, the security, and the power to build the future, exactly where you are.
Mark Peng
