On Thursday, the defense technology company Anduril announced plans to expand its footprint in Southern California with a large campus in Long Beach, a coastal city where founder Palmer Luckey grew up.
The campus is expected to eventually accommodate about 5,500 jobs. Luckey told TechCrunch that these would be new positions, not transfers from other operations.
Anduril’s headquarters are located nearby in Costa Mesa, California, and the company also operates a large manufacturing facility in Ohio. The Long Beach campus will span 1.18 million square feet across six buildings, combining offices with research and development-oriented manufacturing spaces. It is expected to be ready by mid-2027.
Long Beach is an “important aerospace hub right in our backyard,” Luckey told TechCrunch about why the company chose this location.
“It seems we could produce autonomous fighters that take off straight from the factory and fly to where the customer needs them.”
– Palmer Luckey
Profiles of Future Employees and Technical Ambitions
The plan calls for hiring professionals with job profiles similar to those at the headquarters: manufacturing workers, technicians, assemblers, engineers from various disciplines (electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, aerodynamics), as well as roles focused on development and testing, and “a lot of people in logistics, because the things we manufacture there will be shipped all over the world.”
While attracting thousands of jobs to his hometown drew attention, Luckey found the most intriguing aspect to be the creation of autonomous fighters.
“Perhaps planes will leave the factory, fly directly into combat. And I think that is incredibly cool.”
– Palmer Luckey
Anduril also manufactures autonomous military drones and aircraft for land, air, and sea. In 2025 the company unveiled Fury, designed for autonomous flight with AI involvement rather than human remote control. AI executes flight plans set by humans. Fury completed its first test flight in California on October 31.
These moves underscore Anduril’s ambitions in the global defense arena and could potentially impact employment and technological capabilities in the Long Beach region and the United States more broadly.