Anduril Industries, the Costa Mesa-based defense contractor co-founded by Palmer Luckey, continues to snatch up Orange County real estate.
The most recent deal: leasing nearly 42,000 square feet at building owned by the Segerstrom family.
Anduril moved into the 41,770-square-foot space at 3515 Harbor Blvd. in Costa Mesa in early August, according to CoStar.
The lease, where they will occupy the entire first floor of the two-level building, brings the company’s local real estate holdings to a total of more than 1.3 million square feet. Much of the space it’s been snapping up is near its Costa Mesa headquarters.
The lease is another signal that Anduril intends to continue growing in Orange County, where it has zoomed to the second biggest aerospace contractor with 3,200 OC employees, second only to Boeing’s 5,300 employees. Anduril is currently planning its primary factory complex for Columbus, Ohio, where it’s building a $1 billion facility that will have 5 million square feet.
The company, which was formed by Luckey in 2017, became one of Orange County’s largest tenants in 2022 when it moved its headquarters into The Press, a 640,000-square-foot creative office space at the former site of the Los Angeles Times printing facility in Costa Mesa.
Anduril has signed at least seven leases in Orange County since January 2024, Steve Wagner, a JLL broker specializing in Orange County’s industrial sector, told the Business Journal earlier this month.
CoStar confirmed that the new lease at Harbor Gateway Business Center runs through August 2030. Anduril is paying $22.68 per square foot for the space, according to CoStar.
The lease deal was signed in late July just before Anduril committed to nearly 163,000 square feet of warehouse space at the newly built Harbor Logistics Center in Santa Ana. Harbor Logistics Center is located near Costa Mesa’s Harbor Gateway Business Center and Anduril’s headquarters.
The lease signing at Harbor Logistics Center is expected to support distribution, manufacturing or R&D operations.
Anduril did not return a request for comment.
Anduril & Costa Mesa
In June, the company’s Series G round raised $2.5 billion and gave the company a $30.5 billion valuation, according to Anduril Executive Chairman Trae Stephens in a Bloomberg interview. A year ago, the company was valued at $14 billion.
Anduril makes various weapons and defense systems and seeks to overtake some of the nation’s largest defense contractors.
Unlike traditional defense giants like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, Anduril doesn’t wait for the Pentagon to request a product.
Instead, it makes autonomous weapons—powered by the company’s proprietary Lattice AI software and off-the-shelf components—betting that the Pentagon will buy the products.
Some of Anduril’s arsenal of autonomous weapons include: Fury, a fighter jet drone, Seabed Sentry, a mobile sensor network for monitoring military and commercial deep-sea activity, Copperhead, torpedoes named after the venomous snake that can be launched by underwater drones, and Barracuda-M, precision guided autonomous air vehicles (AAVs) that have 500 or more nautical miles of range and over 100 pounds of payload capacity.
The company has signed several contracts, such as a $159 million deal announced earlier this month with the U.S. Army to develop a prototype combining night vision, augmented reality and artificial intelligence into a single system. While Anduril hasn’t disclosed its annual sales, there are some reports that it topped $1 billion in 2024.
Softening Industrial?
Anduril has been leasing space despite CBRE reporting an overall softening of the industrial market. CBRE’s report on Orange County’s industrial market for Q2 2025 found the sector experienced rising vacancy and declining asking lease rates through June 30.
Cushman & Wakefield, in its Q2 2025 report, was more optimistic about Orange County’s industrial market, showing signs of strength heading into 2026.
“Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach continue to post record TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) throughput, with Long Beach marking a record high in April. This could strengthen the Inland Empire and OC logistics corridors, supporting industrial leasing tied to import/distribution cycles,” according to Cushman & Wakefield.
Segerstrom’s Interests
C.J. Segerstrom & Sons was listed as the property’s landlord and leasing agent. Affiliates of the Costa Mesa-based company own and operate South Coast Plaza, Orange County’s most valuable shopping center, and some of the best-known office towers in the South Coast Metro area.
The long-time land and property owner in the South Coast Metro area is also developing a three-building industrial park on nearly 10 acres it owns at W. Lake Center Drive and W. Susan Drive in Santa Ana. The 313,000-square-foot project, called South Coast Technology Center, has an estimated price tag of $126 million.
Santa Ana’s City Council has also initially approved The Village, an ambitious mixed-use project proposed by the Segerstrom family, on Sept. 16. A second vote is scheduled for October.
The Village would bring 1,583 housing units, 300,000 square feet of office, and 80,000 square feet of dining and retail a few blocks away from Anduril headquarters and the most recent lease signings.
Luckey: Bay Area Talent Pool Limiting
Orange County has distinct advantages over Silicon Valley, according to Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Anduril Industries.
When he started Oculus, Luckey said he was able to recruit employees from around the country. After his company was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2.3 billion, Luckey moved to Silicon Valley where he discovered “people don’t want to move to the San Francisco Bay Area” for reasons like overpriced housing and lack of political tolerance.
This limited the talent pool for hiring, he said.
“You end up with a narrow funnel of often mercenary minded, very tech sink-or-swim crowd of people being our whole recruiting pool,” he said. “When I started Anduril, I knew I couldn’t do it again.”
Luckey spoke during a 48-minute interview on the YouTube channel of Lulu Cheng Meservey, who managed communications in the early days of Anduril. Luckey discussed a wide range of topics, including hiring techniques, his company’s success in the defense sector and one of Silicon Valley’s most famous feuds.
He said Silicon Valley companies have a problem by attracting employees “from one ideological bubble.
“I knew that we needed, just like the early days of Oculus, to pull people from all over the country, all walks of life, including military veterans,” Luckey said.
“Military vets don’t want to live in San Francisco either. They do not want to pay $2 million to live in a crap shack.”
‘The Cult of Palmer’
Several Oculus employees followed him to Anduril because they believed in him, Luckey said, adding that founders need a “cult of people” who believe in them.
“They were very much, I guess, in the cult of Palmer. That was an advantage I had.”
Anduril had a strategy of trying not just to attract the right people “but repel the wrong people.”
It employed a “don’t work at Anduril campaign where we highlight ‘This is how hard we work, everyone does field work, everyone gets dirty. We don’t do work from home. We don’t have a barista. But here is what we do: We have work that matters. We have work that is critical. You’ll get to work on lots of cool things with lots of cool people and you’ll get to make a difference.
“In my experience, the mercenaries are not looking for things that are really hard.”
The Whiz Man
He explained that Anduril became successful in the defense sector because it only had to convince a “small number of decision makers” versus being a consumer company where it would have had to convince millions of individuals buyers.
Anduril has become so successful that competitors are telling Congressional representatives that they cannot invest in a similar manner, he said.
“It’s almost like they’re advertising for us,” Luckey said.
He says that now that he’s over 30 years old, he’s no longer a “whiz kid” and prefers the moniker, “Whiz man.” Luckey gave a hint as to when he’s run out of ideas for his company.
“The key to being a whiz man and I’ll go on the record, is to not do a documentary or a biography. The moment that you do that, you are admitting that you are over the hill.”
—Peter J. Brennan
Behind the Palmer-Jason Feud
Palmer Luckey is maintaining one of the tech world’s best-known feuds with Jason Calacanis, despite the latter’s recent apology.
The dispute erupted when Luckey donated to a pro-Donald Trump campaign in 2016 and then was fired from Facebook in 2017, saying a key reason was criticism from Calacanis, who became famous as one of the early investors in Uber and as a co-host of a popular podcast, “All-in.”
Last week during a YouTube interview, Luckey said he initially took the high ground by not responding to the critical comments until he came to realize that it was “horrible advice” to ignore people who attack you.
“The world is better when everyone has teeth and everyone has claws and everyone knows it,” he said. “It’s an armed society is a polite society argument.
“It’s good for people to know that there are consequences for lying about people especially for aggressively arguing that people get fired.”
Calacanis on Sept. 20 took to the X platform to apologize.
“In light of our national conversation about open and lively discourse and debate, I rewatched my comments about @PalmerLuckey from a decade ago, when he was fired from Facebook,” he wrote. “Today, I’m embarrassed by them. I thought it was funny at the time, but it was overly personal and hurtful, akin to kicking a man when he’s down (but certainly not out).
“Also, when Palmer confronted me about it, I got defensive when I should have just apologized in the moment. So, I’m taking this opportunity now to publicly apologize to Palmer Luckey. I regret my behavior.”
Luckey didn’t accept the apology, replying to Calacanis in an X post: “You are pretending the worst of your behavior is a decade in the past, something you only just now fully remembered. But that isn’t the case. You have been consistently horrible all the way up to the present day.
“This whole exercise is pure damage control on your part, and you know it.”
—Peter J. Brennan
