Dive Brief:
- Anduril Industries, a maker of defense drones and technology, plans to build a second campus in Southern California focused on research and development, the Costa Mesa-based company said Thursday.
- The new Long Beach location will support 5,500 jobs across six buildings with over 1 million square feet of office and industrial space, according to a news release. It is expected to be ready by mid-2027.
- The expansion is estimated to surpass $1 billion, the Los Angeles Times reported. Anduril and the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce declined to return messages about the project’s cost.
Dive Insight:
This is the second major investment from Anduril in the past year. The defense technology company last January agreed to spend nearly $1 billion building its Arsenal-1 manufacturing facility in Pickaway County, Ohio, focused on autonomous weapons systems. Production is expected to begin there in July.
Anduril said its Long Beach campus will support the way it builds products by being closer to other key facilities. The site is about a 30-minute drive from Anduril’s Costa Mesa headquarters and 90 minutes from the company’s Capistrano test site, allowing engineers, R&D specialists and flight test teams to “design, test, and iterate quickly across locations.”
Anduril chose to continue growing in Southern California, in part, to be near its suppliers and the region’s workforce. Long Beach has evolved from a historic U.S. Navy hub, previously anchored by a naval shipyard that closed in the late 1990s, into what some are calling “Space Beach,” due to the growing number of space and defense companies in the area.
“Today, the next generation of companies is choosing to build and hire here again,” Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said in a statement. “We look forward to working with our world-class education and workforce partners to prepare local talent to meet this demand.”
Anduril’s new campus will have 750,000 square feet of office space and 435,000 square feet of industrial space for R&D to support its growing industrial capacity, according to a news release. Earlier this month, Anduril secured a $23.9 million contract to build more than 600 drones for the U.S. Marine Corps, after making 300 for another customer in recent months.
In addition to its manufacturing facility under construction in Ohio, the company has key U.S. production sites in Rhode Island, Georgia and Mississippi. It also has a growing international presence, with offices in the U.K. and Australia, as well as plans to expand into Japan and South Korea.
Anduril, founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf and Trae Stephens, has been based in Southern California since its earliest days, when it operated out of a small Orange County warehouse.
