IMTS 2026 Preview: Record Orders and the Automation Story

IMTS 2026 at a glance

Source: AMT/IMTS Media Preview Day press kit, Sept. 13, 2026.

1. Opening day

IMTS 2026 opens today at McCormick Place. AMT's press kit, handed out at Sunday's media preview, puts the show at 1,788 exhibiting companies on 1,117,860 net square feet, with 400 companies exhibiting for the first time. As of September 13, 80,000 people had registered, about 10% more than at the same point before IMTS 2024, and AMT expects final attendance to pass 90,000.

The show has been running in one form or another since 1927, and it still functions mainly as a capital-equipment marketplace: shops come to Chicago to buy machines. What has changed is what comes bolted to the machine.

2. The USMTO numbers

AMT released its July U.S. Manufacturing Technology Orders report on September 13, one day before the show opened. Orders for metalworking machinery came to $605.8 million in July, down 8.0% from June but 55.2% higher than July 2025. That makes five straight months above $500 million, something that has happened only once before since AMT began collecting the data in 1998. For the first seven months of the year, orders total $4.03 billion, up 37.1% on the same period of 2025.

One line in the release deserves more attention than the headline figures. The value of orders through July is up more than a third, but the number of machines ordered is up only 13.0%. AMT says machinery prices have risen modestly over the past two years, but that most of the difference comes from "sustained growth in demand for additional automation." Shops are ordering machines with robot loaders, pallet systems, probing and the software to run them unattended, and paying accordingly.

The customer-industry breakdown is mixed. The biggest drop from June came from makers of engines, turbines and power-transmission equipment, which had been ordering at more than 35% above their long-run average for two years. Electrical equipment manufacturers went the other way, with July their strongest month of 2026 and second-strongest since March 2024; AMT ties that to grid upgrades and new construction, data centers included. Forging and stamping companies placed their largest orders since December 2012.

The detail AMT itself flags is contract machine shops. Their order value slipped only 1.3% from June while the number of units they ordered rose more than 2%. Job shops buying additional spindles, rather than only upgrading existing ones, usually means they are short of capacity.

3. Automation on the floor

The Automation sector is on Level 3 of the North Building, alongside gear generation and abrasive machining. In practice, robots and automated loading are spread across all four buildings, mostly inside the booths of machine tool builders, where a lathe or a five-axis mill is shown with its cell already attached.

Booths to put on the route: KUKA at 236807 and Universal Robots at 236744, both in the North Building automation sector; FANUC America at 338900 in the South Building; and, scattered around them, Amazon Web Services, Boston Dynamics, Google Cloud, Keyence, Hirebotics and Standard Bots.

FANUC has the longest launch list. The CRX-3iA is a collaborative robot with a 3 kg payload that weighs 11 kg, light enough to be carried between stations. The R-50iA Compact DC controller runs CRX arms directly from 24V–48V battery power so they can ride on mobile robots without an inverter. There is also a new ROBODRILL DC series and the 500i-A CNC. The demonstrations lean on partnerships with Google Cloud, NVIDIA and AWS: an AI agent reading a handwritten job note and picking the right part, robots programmed in plain English, a two-arm CRX-5iA plugging in connectors using vision and force feedback, and a robot tightening bolts on a part that is still moving. "Physical AI enables robots to see, reason and act in real-world production environments," FANUC America CEO Mike Cicco said ahead of the show.

Universal Robots is showing PolyScope X, its graphical node-based programming environment. KUKA has iiQKA.OS2 running with machine tools from Matsuura, SYIL and EMAG. All three vendors are making a similar pitch, which is that programming, not hardware, is what keeps small shops from installing robots, and that the fix is software.

For context: U.S. industrial robot installations rose 11% in 2025 to about 38,000 units, according to the IFR. On the IFR's 2024 density figures the United States sits eighth in the world at 307 robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees; South Korea, at the top of the table, has 1,220.

4. The Industrial AI Arena

New this year is the Industrial AI Arena, a grouped area for 32 exhibitors selling AI tools for manufacturing, with Sandia National Laboratories alongside them. A one-day Industrial AI Conference runs with it, on predictive maintenance, quality inspection, deployment and data readiness.

The exhibitor list mixes companies built around AI — Atomic Industries, Ignizia, C-Infinity, Purchaser.ai — with the AI features now embedded in products from FANUC, Universal Robots, Autodesk and Hexagon. The practical question for anyone walking through is what each demo needs on the customer's side to work. A quality-inspection model trained on a vendor's dataset is a different proposition from one that has to be trained on a 30-person job shop's own scrap.

5. AMT's Emerging Technology Center, North Building #236700

AMT's own booth this year is a working demonstration of what it calls surge capability: how quickly domestic manufacturers could ramp up production of defence hardware if asked. The funding comes from the Department of Energy and the Department of War. The lab partners are Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and the Kansas City National Security Campus. Mazak, FANUC, Edgewater Automation, Open Mind, Kennametal, Schunk and Velo3D supplied the equipment.

Three things to see there:

— The drone cell. Oak Ridge and AMT built a reconfigurable line that combines 3D printing, robotic moulding and adaptive tooling to make quadcopter airframes in three sizes (3-inch, 5-inch and 10-inch) on the same equipment. It produces a drone body every nine minutes. Wiring channels and mounting points are printed into the frame, and the parts snap together, so a finished drone can be assembled in under 15 minutes. The whole system went from proposal to working demonstration in less than nine months. Completed drones fly inside a netted enclosure on the show floor.

— FUSE-Mini. This is Oak Ridge's Flexible Unified Sustainment Ecosystem, built with Mazak: a Mazak VC-Ez 20X five-axis machining centre, a VC-Ez WAAM wire-arc additive machine and a VRX C-700 pallet changer, all running on one CAD/CAM workflow. At the show it is being used to modify metal tooling for the drone frames, adding material with the WAAM head only where a design has changed and then machining it back to final geometry, instead of cutting a new mould for every revision. The contact is Thomas Feldhausen at ORNL.

— Aires Tide. An 11-foot flight-test vehicle designed with AI tools and produced largely by 3D printing. Sandia says it was built about seven times faster and at roughly one-fifteenth the cost of conventional methods. Lonnie Love and Dan Turner from Sandia's AI for Nuclear Deterrence programme are on the booth.

AMT President Douglas K. Woods described the ETC as showing "how we can use new technologies and innovative thinking to strengthen the U.S. industrial base." MTConnect and Photo-to-Sim demonstrations are in the same booth.

6. Attractions and programme

IMTS+ Main Stage has keynotes, panels and podcast recordings every day. The IMTS+ Technology Hubs in the South and East Buildings have curated sessions and chairs.

The IMTS Manufacturing Showcase (West Building #432636, run by GIE Media, extending outside into McCormick Square) has six KRATOS aircraft on display — the XQ-58 Valkyrie, MQM-178, BQM-177, UTAP-22 Mako, Tactical Firejet and BQM-167 — plus Pivotal's Helix eVTOL and a RoboTrex CNC automation cell.

The IMTS Shops Zone (Gardner Business Media / Modern Machine Shop) has Bridgeport serial number 1, live cutting from Marathon Precision, an Ilmor V8 and FANUC's Swag Bot. The Machinists' Hub, run by Practical Machinist, is where the shop-floor crowd gathers. Boom Supersonic and AMT have installed a full-size Overture flight deck simulator. The Community Park, with G28, has an RC rock-crawler course built out of exhibit materials and a cornhole tournament. SME and AMT run the Smart Manufacturing Experience Showcase on robotics, machine monitoring and training.

Elsewhere on the calendar: Día de América Latina, a half-day conference in Spanish followed by the Noche Latina reception; the Smartforce Student Summit; and Miles for Manufacturing, a 5K that has raised over $250,000 for STEM and manufacturing education since 2014. The Media Center is on the fourth floor of the North Building, Room N426.

7. What to watch this week

— Whether vendors can put a number on the automation share of an order. AMT's release says the value/unit gap is mostly automation. Machine builders who can say what fraction of a typical 2026 order is the cell rather than the machine would make that concrete.

— Whether job shops keep adding capacity. Contract shops raising unit counts in a month when the overall market fell is the detail that separates a broad recovery from a defence-and-power story. The quoting activity around cobot cells and lights-out setups at the show will say something about it.

— Whether electrical-equipment demand holds. Grid and data-center construction was not a major driver of machine tool orders at IMTS 2024. It is now.

— Whether the show produces its usual bump. AMT's own release ends by saying that orders already set a half-year record and that, given the historic boost associated with IMTS, the second half of 2026 could set an annual one. That is a testable claim; the August and September USMTO reports will settle it.