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

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

The expanded campus will eventually support about 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 in six buildings, combining office space and industrial areas dedicated to research and development. It is expected to be ready by mid-2027, the company said.

Long Beach is a « major aerospace hub right in our backyard, » Luckey told TechCrunch about why the company chose that location.

The plan is to hire employees similar to those who work at the headquarters: production workers, technicians, assemblers and engineers in various disciplines (electrical, mechanical, aerodynamics), as well as build and test roles and « a lot of people on the logistics side, because the things we’re going to do there, we’re going to ship all over the world, » he said.

While securing thousands of jobs in his childhood town made headlines today, Luki said the most exciting part for him was the fighter jets.

« It looks like we’ll be able to produce autonomous combat aircraft that will take off straight from the factory and fly to wherever the customer needs them, » he said. « We could have planes leaving the factory flying directly into combat. And I think that’s extremely cool. »

Anduril makes autonomous military drones and aircraft for land, air and sea. In 2025, it introduced a fighter jet called the Fury, designed to fly autonomously, meaning it runs on AI instead of being piloted remotely by a human operator. AI executes flight plans set by humans. Fury completed its first test flight in California on October 31.