Defense tech company Anduril on Thursday announced its plans to expand its Southern California presence with a major campus in Long Beach, the coastal 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 jobs, not transfers from other operations.

Anduril’s headquarters is nearby, in Costa Mesa, California, and it 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 R&D. 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 similar types of employees to those working at headquarters: manufacturing workers, technicians, assembly workers, and engineers across disciplines (electrical, mechanical, aerodynamics), as well as build and test roles, and “a lot of people on the logistics side, because the things that we’re going to be making there, we’re going to be sending all over the world,” he said.

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

“It looks like we’re going to be able to manufacture autonomous fighter jets that will take off right from the factory and fly to wherever the customer needs them,” he said. “We might have jets leaving the factory, flying directly into combat. And I think that that is extremely cool.”

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