The Anduril empire just keeps on growing. Yesterday, the defense tech giant announced that it’s opening up a new 1M+ square-foot campus in Long Beach, CA, where the firm (can’t really call it a startup anymore, can we?) says it will carry out everything from software development to R&D.
An Anduril spokesperson told Tectonic that the new setup will be an investment “north of $1B” and that “the site will be super similar to HQ [in Costa Mesa] in that it will have spaces for offices as well as machine shops, fabs, etc. for R&D.”
Anduril leadership—including Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, and Matt Grimm—will all stay at headquarters in Costa Mesa. (Sad for Palmer, who actually grew up in Long Beach.)
The new site will employ about 5,500 people—the spokesperson said those would all be new hires—and will be online in mid-2027.
Behemoth: Anduril has been on a hell of a run, growth-wise.
Just in case you’ve been living under a rock—the company was founded back in 2017 and specializes in all things autonomous warfare.
- The defense tech darling has raised over $6.8B in total funding—most recently, a $2.5B Series G led by Founders Fund at a $30.5B valuation last summer, according to Pitchbook data.
- Early last year, the company announced that it’s building a mega-factory in Ohio called Arsenal-1.
- They’ve also got a slew of production facilities and offices around the world—including in Georgia, Mississippi, DC, and Rhode Island in the US, and in places as far away as Australia (remember Ghost Shark?)
- The company has about 7,000 employees across 35 locations, according to Grimm.
When asked why Anduril was opening a new major facility, the company spokesperson said, basically, they ran out of space in Costa Mesa. “We purchased all of the available buildings around our HQ and needed more space,” they said, “We looked from Santa Monica down to San Diego, and the LBC site was perfect for the scale we need to hire as well as the talent density.”
And that access to talent seems to have been an important part of the decision—Long Beach is within “a short drive of Hawthorne, Torrance, and the South Bay, [and] the region offers access to one of the deepest concentrations of engineering and technical talent in the country,” the company said in a statement.
Plus, it’s quite the aerospace hub (Anduril pointed out that it’s sometimes referred to as “Space Beach”). Companies with facilities in Long Beach include: Relativity Space, Vast, Rocket Lab, and True Anomaly.
Big boy: When completed, the company says that the facility will have “750,000 square feet of office space with 435,000 square feet of industrial space dedicated to research and development.” The idea is to have software and hardware R&D all in the same place—like in Costa Mesa.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Luckey hinted that the new space would be great for CCA. “It looks like we’re going to be able to manufacture autonomous fighter jets that will take off right from the factory and fly to wherever the customer needs them,” he said. “We might have jets leaving the factory, flying directly into combat. And I think that that is extremely cool.”
Huge if true. Construction will begin in the next few months—the spokesperson said that engineers would be on-site in mid-2027, and “the building will come online in phases as construction is completed.”