Costa Mesa-based Anduril Industries is planting seeds in Long Beach.
The national security startup announced in late January that it planned to develop its second Southern California campus in Long Beach as domestic demand for autonomous, software-focused military products grows.
The new campus, which is slated to open in 2027, will join Anduril’s growing list of manufacturing sites, testing facilities and regional offices scattered around the country. The Long Beach space is expected to create 5,500 direct jobs, as well as tangential employment through construction and security of the project. The campus will consist of 750,000 square feet of office space and 435,000 square feet of industrial space.
“Long Beach has long been a naval and manufacturing city, with a history of building complex aircraft,” Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said in a statement. “Today, the next generation of companies is choosing to build and hire here again.”
Anduril will soon be neighbors with Long Beach’s expansive ecosystem of spacecraft manufacturers like Vast Space, Coronal and Rebel Space Technologies. These companies are mobilizing to secure national dominance of space and satellite infrastructure as geopolitical tensions threaten connectivity and communications across the globe.
“California remains one of the few places in the world where advanced technology, industrial capacity and a deep technical workforce come together at scale,” Anduril said in its announcement. “Southern California has long been a center of American aerospace and defense innovation, and Long Beach sits at the heart of that ecosystem.”
It’s not the first company to specifically seek out Long Beach’s opportune proximity to the ports, manufacturing plants and a wide breadth of talent in the aerospace and defense sector.
In August, Orbital Operations – an aerospace company developing high-thrust, cryogenic satellites for in-orbit defense – set up its first facility in Long Beach.
“From the start, we felt a strong alignment between Orbital Operations’ vision and the city’s commitment to advanced manufacturing and space innovation,” Ross Doherty, the chief operating officer of Orbital Operations, said in a statement. “We look forward to contributing to Long Beach’s thriving ecosystem and creating opportunities for the community as we grow.”
Long Beach has been a hub for major defense contractors like The Boeing Co., who defined what American-made military hardware looked like. But it came at a high cost and slow production timelines.
Today, military activity is conducted using cheap drones and consumer-grade hardware that is deployed just as quickly as it is damaged, making it hard for American primes to keep up.
That’s why companies like Anduril – which explicitly boast its software-forward technology over clunky hardware – are seeing some love from both the federal government and private investors. Southern California-based companies in aerospace and defense garnered more than $4.7 billion in funding in 2025, according to PitchBook, an all-time high for the region’s sector.
This is the second massive geographic investment Anduril has announced in the past year. In 2025, the company announced it would spend around $1 billion to build a manufacturing facility in Ohio, called Arsenal-1, which would build out its autonomous weapons with a fast turnaround time in mind.
“Arsenal-1 represents a step forward in how we manufacture the autonomous systems and weapons that our nation and our allies need to remain secure,” Anduril Chief Executive Brian Schimpf said in a statement.