The coolest thing about Anduril’s expansion into Long Beach is the fighter jets, Palmer Luckey says

Defense technology company Anduril on Thursday announced plans to expand its presence in Southern California with a major campus in Long Beach, the coastal city where its founder Palmer Luckey grew up.

The expanded campus will ultimately support approximately 5,500 jobs. Luckey told TechCrunch that these will be new jobs, not transfers from other operations.

Anduril is headquartered nearby, in Costa Mesa, California, and also has a massive manufacturing facility in Ohio. The Long Beach campus will span 1.18 million square feet across six buildings, combining office space and industrial areas dedicated to research and development. The company said it is expected to be ready by mid-2027.

Long Beach is “a major aviation hub in our backyard,” Luckey told TechCrunch about why the company chose this location.

The plan is to hire similar types of employees to those who work at headquarters: manufacturing workers, technicians, assembly workers, engineers in various disciplines (electrical, mechanical, aerodynamics), as well as construction and testing roles, and “a lot of people on the logistics side, because the stuff we’re going to make there, we’re going to send it all over the world.”

While bringing thousands of jobs to his childhood city made headlines today, Luckey said the most exciting part to him are the fighter jets.

He said: “It seems that we will be able to manufacture self-driving fighter planes that take off directly from the factory and fly to wherever the customer needs.” “We could have planes that leave the factory and fly straight into combat. I think that’s pretty cool.”

Anduril manufactures autonomous military drones, land, air and sea aircraft. In 2025, it unveiled a fighter jet called Fury, designed to fly autonomously, meaning it operates using artificial intelligence rather than being piloted remotely by a human operator. AI executes flight plans created by humans. The Fury completed its first test flight in California on October 31.