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

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

The expanded campus will eventually support about 5,500 jobs. Luckey told TechCrunch that these will be new projects, not transfers from other projects.

Anduril’s headquarters is nearby, in Costa Mesa, California, and it’s also big shopping center in Ohio. The Long Beach campus will span 1.18 million square feet across six buildings, including office space and industrial space dedicated to R&D. It is expected to be ready by mid-2027, the company said.

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

The plan is to hire the same types of workers as those who work at the headquarters: workers at the headquarters: production workers, technicians, assembly workers, and various engineers (electrical, mechanical, mechanical), as well as construction and testing, and “a lot of people on the transportation side, because the things we will be making there, we will be sending them all over the world,” he said.

While bringing thousands of jobs to his hometown that are in the headlines today, Luckey said the most exciting part for him is the fighter jets.

“It looks like we can build autonomous military aircraft that take off from the factory and fly wherever the customer wants,” he said. “We can have airplanes coming out of the factory, flying into the war. And I think that’s really exciting.”

Anduril manufactures autonomous military drones and aircraft for land, air and sea. In 2025, that he unveiled a fighter jet called Fury, designed to fly autonomously, meaning it operates using AI instead of being piloted by a human. AI creates human-based flight plans. The Fury finished his first test flight in California on October 31.