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Defense tech company Anduril on Thursday announced<\/a> its plans to expand its Southern California presence with a major campus in Long Beach, the coastal town where founder Palmer Luckey grew up.<\/p>\n The expanded campus will eventually support about 5,500 jobs. Luckey told TechCrunch that these will be new jobs, not transfers from other operations.<\/p>\n Anduril\u2019s headquarters is nearby, in Costa Mesa, California, and it also has a massive manufacturing facility in Ohio<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n Long Beach is \u201ca major aerospace hub right in our backyard,\u201d Luckey told TechCrunch about why the company chose that location.<\/p>\n 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 \u201ca lot of people on the logistics side, because the things that we\u2019re going to be making there, we\u2019re going to be sending all over the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n While bringing thousands of jobs to his childhood town made headlines today, Luckey said the most exciting part for him was the fighter jets. <\/p>\n \u201cIt looks like we\u2019re 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,\u201d he said. \u201cWe might have jets leaving the factory, flying directly into combat. And I think that that is extremely cool.\u201d<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> Anduril makes autonomous military drones and aircraft for land, air, and sea. In 2025, it unveiled a fighter jet<\/a> 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<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n