Palmer Luckey says the coolest thing about Anduril expanding to Long Beach is the fighter jets

Protection tech firm Anduril on Thursday announced its plans to develop its Southern California presence with a serious campus in Lengthy Seashore, the coastal city the place founder Palmer Luckey grew up.

The expanded campus will finally assist about 5,500 jobs. Luckey informed TechCrunch that these might be new jobs, not transfers from different operations.

Anduril’s headquarters is close by, in Costa Mesa, California, and it additionally has a large manufacturing facility in Ohio. The Lengthy Seashore campus will span 1.18 million sq. toes throughout six buildings, combining workplace area and industrial areas devoted to R&D. It’s anticipated to be prepared by mid-2027, the corporate stated.

Lengthy Seashore is “a serious aerospace hub proper in our again yard,” Luckey informed TechCrunch about why the corporate selected that location.

The plan is to rent related forms of workers to these working at headquarters: manufacturing employees, technicians, meeting employees, and engineers throughout disciplines (electrical, mechanical, aerodynamics), in addition to construct and take a look at roles, and “lots of people on the logistics aspect, as a result of the issues that we’re going to be making there, we’re going to be sending all around the world,” he stated.

Whereas bringing hundreds of jobs to his childhood city made headlines immediately, Luckey stated probably the most thrilling half for him was the fighter jets.

“It appears like we’re going to have the ability to manufacture autonomous fighter jets that can take off proper from the manufacturing unit and fly to wherever the client wants them,” he stated. “We’d have jets leaving the manufacturing unit, flying immediately into fight. And I believe that that’s extraordinarily cool.”

Anduril makes autonomous navy drones and plane for land, air and sea. In 2025, it unveiled a fighter jet known as Fury, designed to fly autonomously, that means it operates utilizing AI moderately than being piloted remotely by a human operator. The AI executes flight plans set by people. The Fury accomplished its first test flight in California on October 31.