Defense technology company Anduril on Thursday was announced its plans to expand its presence in Southern California with a major campus in Long Beach, the beach town where founder Palmer Luckey grew up.
The expanded campus will eventually support approximately 5,500 jobs. Luckey told TechCrunch that these will be new jobs, not transfers from other businesses.
Anduril is headquartered nearby in Costa Mesa, California, and also has a huge manufacturing facility in Ohio. The Long Beach campus will span 1.18 million square feet in six buildings, combining office space and industrial space dedicated to R&D. It is expected to be ready by mid-2027, the company said.
Long Beach is “a major aerospace hub right in our backyard,” Luckey told TechCrunch about why the company chose that location.
The plan is to hire similar types of workers to those at headquarters: manufacturing workers, technicians, assembly workers and engineers in disciplines (electrical, mechanical, aerodynamics), as well as manufacturing and testing roles, and “a lot of people on the logistics side, because the things we’re going to ship will be told around the world.”
While bringing thousands of jobs to his hometown made headlines today, Luckey said the most exciting part for him was the fighter jets.
“It looks like we’ll be able to build autonomous fighter jets that will take off straight from the factory and fly wherever the customer needs them,” he said. “We could have jets leaving the factory, flying directly into battle. And I think that’s extremely cool.”
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
Anduril manufactures autonomous military drones and aircraft for land, air and sea. In 2025, that is presented a fighter jet called Fury, designed to fly autonomously, meaning it operates using AI rather than being remotely piloted by a human operator. AI executes human-defined flight plans. Fury completed her first test flight in California on October 31st.
