Space Beach will soon get a new resident.
Anduril Industries, a defense company headquartered in Costa Mesa, announced plans on Thursday, Jan. 22, to open a major new campus in Long Beach.
The company’s new campus, its announcement said, will house six buildings across 1.18 million square feet. About 435,000 square feet of the campus will be dedicated to industrial research and development space, with the additional 750,000 square feet being reserved for office space.
In total, the company expects to employ 5,500 people on site once the new campus is up-and-running — which is expected in mid-2027, Anduril Industries said.
Anduril picked Long Beach, according to its announcement, because of the city’s longstanding history with U.S. defense and industrial legacy — and because it sits at the heart of the industry’s ecosystem.
“Within a short drive of Hawthorne, Torrance and the South Bay, the region offers access to one of the deepest concentrations of engineering and technical talent in the country,” the company said. “That combination of history, talent and industrial infrastructure makes Long Beach a natural place for Anduril to continue scaling its operations.”
The new campus will also be built to support Anduril’s existing workflows.
“The campus is located approximately 30 minutes from Anduril’s Costa Mesa headquarters and about 90 minutes from the company’s Capistrano test site, allowing teams to design, test, and iterate quickly across locations,” Anduril said. “This close physical integration is central to Anduril’s approach to rapid development and deployment.”
Anduril is also developing Arsenal-1, a massive manufacturing facility, in Ohio. The company is investing nearly $1 billion of its own money into that development, which is expected to bring more than 4,000 jobs to the state.
“Together, these facilities form a growing industrial backbone designed to support sustained production, rapid iteration, and long-term delivery for customers worldwide,” the company said.
Anduril Industries was founded in 2017 in Orange County by Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR and designer of Facebook’s (now Meta) Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.
Palmer was fired from Facebook in 2017 over a controversy surrounding his $10,000 donation to President Donald Trump’s first campaign. It was later revealed that he negotiated a $100 million payout from the company after he hired an employment lawyer to argue Facebook had broken state law, according to the Wall Street Journal.
That same year, Palmer co-founded Anduril Industries with former Oculus VR hardware developer Joseph Chen, alongside former Palantir Technology employees Brain Schimpf, Trae Stephens and Matt Grimm.
The company’s mission is “transforming defense capabilities with advanced technology,” according to its website. The company is focused on bolstering U.S. and allied military capabilities using artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and autonomous systems, according to its website.
The company’s flagship offering is Lattice, a software platform that “powers the capabilities of our software-defined weapons, and easily integrates with third-party and government-owned capabilities to create a comprehensive, extensible network of sensors and effectors,” the company’s website says.
Anduril is also significantly involved in surveilling America’s Southern border with Mexico, according to its website. Its Sentry towers, which uses artificial intelligence to “provide highly accurate, persistent and autonomous awareness across land, sea and air,” are already in use to monitor more than 30% of the U.S.-Mexico border, its website says.
“Autonomous Sentry towers detect, classify, and track objects of interest in real-time across vast and remote terrains,” the company’s website says, “saving manpower and cost spent on manual surveillance while keeping agents out of harm’s way.”
Anduril was also a large beneficiary of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — which included a provision requiring border surveillance to be autonomous — effectively making Anduril the only government-approved border tower vendor, as reported by The Intercept.
Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, in a statement included in Anduril’s announcement, said the company’s decision to open a new campus in the city is a “vote of confidence” in Long Beach’s advanced manufacturing and aerospace leadership.
“Long Beach has long been a naval and manufacturing city, with a history of building complex aircraft. Today, the next generation of companies is choosing to build and hire here again,” Richardson said. “We are proud to welcome Anduril to Space Beach – one of the fastest-growing aerospace and advanced manufacturing hubs in the country, and we look forward to working with our world-class education and workforce partners to prepare local talent to meet this demand.”
Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Jeremy Harris similarly applauded Anduril’s expansion to the city on Thursday, hailing the news as a win for Long Beach’s long-term economic growth and its goal to create 8,000 new jobs as part of its Accler8 by ’28 initiative.
“Through ongoing collaboration with the City of Long Beach, including efforts like Grow Long Beach, job creation remains central to a strong local economy,” Harris said. “The Chamber looks forward to continuing this work alongside the City and our partners to support employers and the workforce that drives our region forward.”
This story is breaking and will be updated.