Defense Technology Institute Anduril on Thursday announcement Its plan to expand its presence in Southern California includes 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. Lucky told TechCrunch that these will be new jobs, not transfers from other operations.

Anduril’s headquarters are nearby, in Costa Mesa, California, and it has a large area. 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 space hub in our backyard,” Lockey told TechCrunch about why the company chose that location.

The plan is to hire the same types of employees as those at headquarters: manufacturing workers, technicians, assembly workers and engineers across disciplines (electrical, mechanical, aerodynamics), as well as construction and testing roles, and “a lot of people on the logistics side, because the things we’re going to build there, we’re going to ship all over the world,” he said.

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

“It looks like we’ll be able to build autonomous fighter jets that take off straight from the factory and fly to where the customer needs them,” he said. “Our jets can leave the factory and fly straight into combat. And I think that’s pretty cool.”

Anduril makes autonomous military drones and aircraft for land, air and sea. In 2025, it is Unveiling a fighter jet Known as Fury, it is designed to fly autonomously, meaning it operates using AI rather than being piloted remotely by a human operator. AI executes flight plans dictated by humans. The Fury has done that First test flight to California on October 31.