Defense technology firm Anduril revealed plans Thursday to expand its Southern California footprint with a major new campus in Long Beach, the coastal city where founder Palmer Luckey grew up. The company said the expanded campus will eventually support about 5,500 jobs, a figure Luckey emphasized will be entirely new positions rather than transfers from existing operations. The announcement marks a significant growth milestone for the company as it scales manufacturing and R&D efforts in a region that has long been an aerospace hub.
Anduril’s headquarters is nearby in Costa Mesa, California, and the company already maintains a large manufacturing facility in Ohio. The new Long Beach campus will cover 1.18 million square feet across six buildings, combining office space with industrial facilities dedicated to research and development. Anduril said the campus is expected to be ready by mid-2027. Luckey told TechCrunch that Long Beach was chosen because it sits in the heart of a major aerospace ecosystem, offering access to talent and infrastructure that supports high-tech manufacturing and aviation.
The company’s hiring plan for Long Beach mirrors the workforce at its headquarters, including manufacturing workers, technicians, assembly staff, and engineers across disciplines such as electrical, mechanical, and aerodynamics. The expansion will also create roles focused on building and testing, as well as logistics, since Anduril expects to ship products worldwide from the site. “A lot of people on the logistics side, because the things that we’re going to be making there, we’re going to be sending all over the world,” Luckey said, underscoring the global ambitions behind the Long Beach project.
While the promise of thousands of jobs made headlines, Luckey said the most exciting aspect of the new campus is not the employment figures but the company’s ability to build autonomous fighter jets. He described a future in which jets could take off directly from the factory and fly to customers’ locations, potentially even entering combat missions immediately after leaving the facility. “We might have jets leaving the factory, flying directly into combat. And I think that that is extremely cool,” he said, framing the development as a breakthrough in how military aircraft could be produced and deployed.
Anduril is known for developing autonomous military drones and aircraft for land, air, and sea. In 2025, the company unveiled a fighter jet called Fury, designed to operate autonomously using AI, with humans setting flight plans rather than directly piloting the aircraft. Fury completed its first test flight in California on October 31, marking a significant step toward the company’s vision of AI-driven military aviation. The Long Beach campus represents a major bet that this vision can scale, combining advanced manufacturing and AI-powered flight to redefine how military hardware is produced and deployed.
