Palmer Lackey says the best part about Anduril’s arrival in Long Beach is its fighters.

Defense technology company Anduril on Thursday announced plans to expand its Southern California presence with the opening of a large campus in Long Beach, the coastal town where founder Palmer Lackey grew up.

The expanded campus is expected to eventually support approximately 5,500 jobs. Lackey told TechCrunch that these will be new jobs, not transfers from other roles.

Anduril’s headquarters are in nearby Costa Mesa, California, and it also has a large manufacturing facility in Ohio. The Long Beach campus spans 1.18 million square feet across six buildings and combines office space and industrial areas dedicated to research and development. The company says it is expected to be completed by mid-2027.

Long Beach “is a major aerospace hub in our backyard,” Lackey told TechCrunch of why the company chose the location.

The plan is to hire similar types of employees to those working at the company’s headquarters. In addition to manufacturing workers, technicians, assembly workers, and engineers across disciplines (electrical, mechanical, aerodynamics), as well as manufacturing and testing roles, “we’re going to hire a lot of people on the logistics side, because what we’re making here is going to be shipped all over the world,” he said.

Despite today’s headlines about bringing thousands of jobs to his childhood town, Luckey said it’s the fighter jets that are most exciting to him.

“It looks like we’ll be able to build autonomous fighter jets that can quickly take off from the factory and fly wherever the customer needs them,” he said. “Jets could come out of the factory and fly directly into combat. And I think that would be pretty cool.”

Anduril manufactures autonomous military drones and aircraft for land, air and sea use. In 2025, the company unveiled the Fury, a fighter jet designed to fly autonomously. That means it uses AI to operate, rather than being controlled remotely by a human operator. AI executes the flight plan set by humans. Fury completed its first test flight in California on October 31st.