Anduril is building a $1 billion campus and a Nissan drone factory on two continents — and adding 244 jobs a week

Inside the Long Beach Bet

Anduril Industries is building a 1.1-million-square-foot campus at Douglas Park in Long Beach, California, a six-building complex that will house 750,000 square feet of office space and 435,000 square feet of industrial R&D facilities. The Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce values the project at over $1 billion. Construction begins in 2026, with the first building expected to come online by the end of 2027. The company, co-founded by Palmer Luckey and valued at more than $30 billion, will add roughly 5,500 jobs at the site.

The scale matters because of what it represents. Traditional defense primes have spent decades optimizing production lines designed for hardware that rolls off in low volumes at high cost — think fighter jets and satellites built over years. Anduril's Long Beach campus is designed around a different premise: software-defined weapons produced at commercial manufacturing speed. The facility will co-locate software developers, flight-test teams, and R&D specialists alongside machine shops, test chambers, and fabrication equipment. That layout reflects a production philosophy where the bottleneck isn't a machining step — it's the iteration loop between code and hardware.

Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm said the company chose Long Beach for three reasons: proximity to the existing Costa Mesa headquarters (about 30 minutes), roughly 90 minutes from its Capistrano test site, and the density of aerospace talent in the region. "The talent exists around Long Beach and the neighboring communities of folks who are just world-class experts in the aerospace sectors is truly, truly remarkable," Grimm told the Los Angeles Times. The company has about 7,000 employees across 35 locations, with roughly half based in Southern California.

The campus sits in a city that has spent years actively courting defense and aerospace firms under the "Space Beach" branding. Mayor Rex Richardson called the announcement "a major vote of confidence" and tied it to a broader resurgence in local industrial activity. Rocket Lab already operates nearby. Vast and JetZero have also set up operations in the area. Anduril's move follows a $23.9 million contract to supply weaponized drones to the U.S. Marine Corps and a 2024 partnership with Palantir to jointly bid on Pentagon contracts.

The workforce math is straightforward on paper (5,500 direct hires, thousands more in construction and support services), but the harder question is whether the region can supply that many skilled workers fast enough. Anduril said it is coordinating with the Long Beach Unified School District and two local colleges on workforce development programs. The company's own hiring pace suggests confidence: Zero G Talent's board lists 244 Anduril roles added in the past 7 days, spanning Costa Mesa, El Segundo, Lexington, and Hudson, New Hampshire.

This isn't a satellite office or a regional sales hub. It's a manufacturing campus built to produce autonomous weapons systems at scale, and it signals that Anduril is betting its next phase of growth on a city that hasn't anchored a major defense production facility in decades.

The Costa Mesa HQ Sale: Arbitrage as Strategy

The 634,000-square-foot office and research campus in Costa Mesa that serves as Anduril's headquarters is on the market, and the sale has nothing to do with any retreat. The company is expanding, and it's the real estate play that's interesting.

Invesco Ltd. and SteelWave LLC own the property, a former Los Angeles Times printing plant converted into creative office space and renovated in 2023. Anduril has leased the entire complex since 2021 and has 13 years remaining on that lease. Eastdil Secured is marketing the listing with no public asking price, but a $251 million mortgage the owners obtained in September 2025 from a Pacific Investment Management Co. real estate fund implies a market value around $400 million, based on a typical 65% loan-to-value ratio. If realized, that would make it Orange County's largest office sale this year.

The buyer is getting a single-tenant asset with a long lease and a tenant that holds multibillion-dollar federal contracts. Stream Realty Partners Executive Managing Director Marty Pupil called it "a very unique sale" because the campus is 100% occupied and Anduril carries long-term credit with the federal government. The likely buyer pool is narrow: pension funds, life insurance companies, and private equity firms that specialize in net-lease properties.

Anduril is not selling the building; it's staying put. The owners are. And the company is using the moment to run a clean arbitrage: remain a tenant in a headquarters it no longer needs to own or control, while the ownership changes hands at a valuation that reflects defense-tech demand in Southern California. Venture capital investment in U.S. defense startups hit $11.4 billion through mid-June 2026, more than double the $4.6 billion in the same period last year, according to PitchBook. Anduril alone raised $7.5 billion over the past year. That capital is driving real estate decisions.

The Costa Mesa campus was right when Anduril was smaller. The Long Beach facility is the production-scale site. The company is also building Arsenal-1, a 5-million-square-foot industrial park in Ohio for combat aircraft production. The headquarters label on Costa Mesa was legacy. The strategy is to lease it back, let institutional investors compete for the yield, and pour capital into the sites that actually build product.

This is the pattern defense-tech companies are watching. Own the production. Lease the office. Let someone else hold the mortgage.

Anduril's Japan Gambit

Anduril Industries is in talks to acquire Nissan Motor's Oppama assembly plant near Tokyo, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on June 25, 2026. The negotiations, which Reuters reported exclusively, would convert a 64-year-old car factory into a military drone production site — a move that signals how AI-native defense firms are building manufacturing footprints across allied nations rather than relying on domestic supply chains alone.

No deal has been signed. Nissan, which plans to shutter Oppama in 2028 as part of a restructuring that cuts 1 million vehicles of production capacity, said it is talking with other potential buyers. Anduril declined to comment on what it called "market speculation," but said it was "exploring opportunities to strengthen local production" in Japan. The company has not submitted a price for the site, sources said, and still needs to secure orders from Japan's Ministry of Defense to justify any purchase.

The Oppama plant sprawls across 1.7 million square meters with research, testing, and port facilities. It opened in 1961 and has produced roughly 18 million vehicles. Anduril has offered to retrain the factory's 2,400 workers to build defense equipment, one source told Reuters. The site sits an hour by train south of Tokyo, close to Yokosuka naval base, headquarters of Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force and home port for the U.S. Navy's only forward-deployed aircraft carrier strike group.

The talks align with a broader push by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's government to expand defense manufacturing. Takaichi is expected to unveil a new national security strategy this year that accelerates spending on drones, munitions, and other equipment. Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi met Anduril founder Palmer Luckey in December during Luckey's visit to Tokyo for the opening of the company's Japanese unit. Koizumi said on X that Japan had "much to learn from Anduril."

Anduril has already laid groundwork for Japanese production. Last year the company built a prototype drone called Kizuna, Japanese for "bond," using only Japanese components, a deliberate demonstration that it could meet Tokyo's domestic-content requirements. The company has also opened units in Taiwan and South Korea to tap rising military spending across the region.

The Japan talks come as Anduril pursues a parallel expansion in Southern California. Together, the two efforts point to a dual-continent manufacturing model that legacy defense primes, locked into fixed domestic production lines and licensed overseas assembly, have no equivalent for.

If Anduril closes the Oppama deal, the question becomes whether Japan's military moves fast enough to place orders that justify retooling a factory built for cars. Nissan's timeline gives both sides a narrow window: the plant closes in 2028.

What Anduril's Hiring Reveals

Anduril's hiring reveals the company's production philosophy before its factories are built. The company added 244 roles to the Zero G Talent board in the past week, a pace that dwarfs Northrop Grumman's 36 and Boeing's 43 over the same period. The mix of titles tells the story: camera test engineers, modeling and simulation specialists, and senior space-sitting roles in El Segundo sit alongside traditional supply chain directors and logistics program managers. This isn't a defense contractor staffing a production line. It's a software company building hardware the way a software company builds hardware.

The distinction matters because it explains why Anduril can credibly talk about a $1 billion campus and a Japanese factory simultaneously. Traditional primes like Northrop Grumman organize production around platform programs, a new aircraft or a new satellite, with engineering teams structured around requirements handed down from Pentagon acquisition offices. The result is visible in Northrop's own listings: industrial engineers, cost engineers, and program directors layered in a hierarchy that reflects decades of earned-value management. Boeing's Millennium Space Systems postings follow a similar pattern, with ATLO functional managers and senior industrial engineers executing against fixed specifications.

Anduril's listings point to a different internal logic. The presence of a camera test engineer and a senior modeling and simulation engineer on the same hiring board suggests the company treats sensor integration and virtual prototyping as first-class production functions, not subcontracted afterthoughts. The salary ranges reflect this:

These aren't assembly-line wages. They're the rates you pay when the person managing your supply chain also needs to understand the software bill of materials.

This is the workforce architecture that makes dual-continent manufacturing plausible. If your production pipeline is software-defined — if the same simulation environment that designs a drone's airframe also generates test protocols for the factory floor — then opening a second facility in a different country is an exercise in replication, not reinvention. The engineering talent at Anduril's El Segundo office working on space modeling and simulation can, in principle, hand off production parameters to a team operating a repurposed Nissan plant in Japan without the months of translation loss that plague traditional primes managing subcontractor networks across allied nations.

The contrast with legacy hiring patterns is sharp. Northrop Grumman's AI systems engineer role is buried inside a 36-role weekly intake dominated by survivability engineering and cost accounting. AI is a specialty. At Anduril, it's the substrate — the reason the company needs micro-electronics technicians in New Hampshire and camera engineers in Massachusetts rather than the traditional defense manufacturing belt.

Whether this hiring velocity is sustainable depends on whether the Long Beach campus and the Nissan talks convert to actual production contracts. But the workforce signal is clear: Anduril is building a company where the factory is a deployment target, not the center of gravity.

Can California Absorb a Defense-Tech Surge?

Anduril's Long Beach campus doesn't exist in a political vacuum. Governor Gavin Newsom has spent the last several years positioning California as the domestic counterweight to the traditional defense-corridor geography of Northern Virginia and Texas, and Anduril's 5,500-job expansion is the biggest validation of that bet yet. The state's calculus is straightforward: defense-tech manufacturing jobs pay well, cluster near existing aerospace infrastructure, and don't carry the political liability of fossil-fuel extraction.

Newsom's office hasn't been quiet about the win. The governor has framed Anduril's expansion as proof that California's workforce pipeline, fed by UCLA, Cal Poly, and the UC system, can supply the software-and-hardware hybrid talent that autonomous defense platforms demand. That's not just rhetoric. The state's Competitive Tax Credit program and the California Defense Research Institute have both been used to anchor defense-adjacent companies that might otherwise have landed in lower-cost states. Long Beach specifically benefits from a city-level incentive structure that includes streamlined permitting for industrial construction near the port complex, which matters when you're moving carbon-fiber airframes and solid-state electronics instead of sheet metal.

The political subtext is harder to ignore. California's congressional delegation has historically been skeptical of defense spending, but autonomous systems and AI-driven manufacturing have reframed the conversation. When Anduril talks about building drones in Long Beach, it's not asking for a tank contract; it's offering software-defined production jobs that align with the state's economic identity. That framing has made it easier for Newsom and local officials to back the expansion without friction from the legislature's progressive wing.

What matters for the workforce is the clustering effect. Anduril's Long Beach campus sits inside a corridor that already includes Northrop Grumman's El Segundo facilities, Boeing's Millennium Space Systems operation, and a dense network of electronics suppliers stretching from Irvine to the Port of Long Beach. When a Sustainment Lead or a Camera Test Engineer leaves Anduril, they don't leave Southern California; they cross the street. That labor liquidity is the actual incentive, more than any tax credit. Companies hiring in the region can pull from a pool that's already been trained on classified-adjacent work, export-controlled hardware, and the specific compliance culture that defense manufacturing requires.

The 5,500 jobs Anduril has committed to will test whether California's infrastructure, including housing, transit, and the power grid, can absorb a defense-manufacturing surge the way it absorbed the tech boom. Long Beach's city council is watching closely. So is Newsom's office. If the campus hits its hiring targets on schedule, expect the state to use Anduril as the anchor tenant in its next pitch to other autonomous-defense companies considering U.S. expansion. If it stalls, the political narrative shifts fast. Either way, the jobs are already posted, and the clock is running.

AI-Native Production vs. Legacy Primes

The Navy's Collaborative Combat Aircraft program tells the story in miniature. Four legacy primes — Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin — plus Anduril all hold conceptual design contracts for the carrier-based drone wingman effort, USNI reported in September 2025. The Air Force's Increment 1 CCA contracts went to just two: Anduril and General Atomics. Northrop Grumman's self-financed offering was not selected. That split, four incumbents and one startup on the Navy side, two on the Air Force production contract, is the competitive landscape redrawn in a single procurement cycle.

Anduril's position is unusual. The company is simultaneously on the Navy's CCA conceptual design roster with Boeing, Northrop, and General Atomics, and on the Air Force's short list to actually build and field aircraft. It is also negotiating to repurpose a Nissan factory in Japan for drone production while breaking ground on the same 1.1-million-square-foot campus in Long Beach. No legacy prime is manufacturing on two continents for the U.S. military and its allies at this speed.

The valuation gap reflects the shift investors are pricing in. Anduril closed a $5 billion Series H round in May 2026 at a $61 billion valuation, roughly 28 times its $2.2 billion 2025 revenue. That multiple is closer to hypergrowth enterprise software than to a defense contractor, where single-digit revenue multiples remain the norm. The premium rests on three factors: manufacturing scale, autonomy, and execution speed — the same factors that let Anduril win a fighter-aircraft production contract for the first time since the 1970s, as VP Mark Shushnar pointed out.

Legacy primes are not standing still. Northrop Grumman is hiring an AI Systems Engineer at the principal or senior principal level in El Segundo and a Program Director for Autonomy in Redondo Beach, according to live listings on Zero G Talent. Boeing posted 43 roles in the past week spanning software process engineering and ATLO functional management. But the workforce signals point in different directions. Anduril's 244 new roles in the same window include a Sustainment Lead, a Director of Supply Chain, and a Senior Modeling and Simulation Engineer, positions that map directly onto manufacturing and production infrastructure. Northrop's open roles skew toward survivability engineering and cost accounting. The distinction is between hiring to sustain a legacy platform and hiring to build a new production line.

The DoD's own architecture mandate reinforces the gap. The department's AI strategy directs program managers to enforce Modular Open System Architectures and expose interfaces sufficient for third-party integration without prime contractor support. That is a deliberate move away from the proprietary, prime-controlled integration model that defined the F-35, KC-46, and Sentinel programs, the model that Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman built their margins on.

None of this means the primes are finished. Lockheed holds the common control system contract for the Navy's CCA through its Skunk Works MDCX platform. Boeing is building the MQ-25 tanker that will prove out autonomous carrier landings. General Atomics' YFQ-42A entered flight testing in August 2025. The industrial base, the lobbying relationships, and the congressional district math still favor incumbents on programs of record measured in hundreds of billions.

But Anduril's dual-continent manufacturing push, Long Beach for the U.S. and a Nissan plant for Japan, is building a workforce and production footprint optimized for software-driven autonomous systems at scale. The legacy primes are optimized for hardware programs with decade-long production cycles and cost-plus structures. The next procurement era will reward whichever model can field, iterate, and upgrade faster. Right now, only one company is hiring for both.

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