Defense company Anduril Industries said it’s building a major new site in Long Beach to employ 5,500 people that will reportedly cost $1 billion.
The Long Beach campus will span approximately 1.2 million square feet across six buildings, combining 750,000 square feet of office space with 435,000 square feet of industrial space dedicated to research and development. The facility is expected to be operational in mid-2027.
“We are proud to welcome Anduril to Space Beach—one of the fastest-growing aerospace and advanced manufacturing hubs in the country,” Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said in a statement on Jan. 22.
The new complex will cost $1 billion, according to the Los Angeles Times, which didn’t say where it got the information.
The site, which sits next to Long Beach Airport, is owned by Irvine-based developer Sares Regis Group, which in 2012 bought a 160-acre parcel of land at Douglas Park. The area was used by Boeing Co. for aircraft manufacturing prior to the sale to Sares Regis.
Sares Regis Group was represented by Jeff Read, Jim Biondi, and Terry Reitz with Newmark on the transaction, while Anduril Industries was represented by Tucker Hughes with Hughes Marino.
Investor website PitchBook said in January that Anduril had raised $6.8 billion to date. Anduril did not state how it would finance the Long Beach expansion.
Loren Simpson, a spokesperson for the City of Long Beach, told the Business Journal that “the city did not provide financial incentives” for Anduril’s project.
Willie Rudman, a spokesperson for the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, said “the state did not provide any financial assistance or subsidies for the company’s newly announced campus.”
Anduril’s rapidly expanding Southern California operations will be approaching 3 million square feet when the Long Beach project is complete.
Anduril now leases close to 1.5 million square feet of office and warehouse space in Orange County, including space now under construction in Santa Ana and Costa Mesa, according to Business Journal data. It is now comfortably the area’s largest office tenant by square footage, and the company has nearly doubled its local real estate footprint in little more than a year.
Shaking Up Defense Industry
Anduril aims to shake up the giant defense industry by using manufacturing techniques popular in Silicon Valley, such as combining its proprietary Lattice software system with off-the-shelf components.
The Long Beach campus is designed to support the way Anduril builds products. Software engineers will work alongside hardware engineers; flight test teams will collaborate directly with research and development specialists, and teams will have direct access to machine shops, testing facilities and fabrication equipment on site.
Long Beach, just over the line from Orange County, is already home to outer space firm Rocket Lab, while the JetZero startup has taken space next to Long Beach airport to develop a delta-shaped passenger jetliner. The Boeing Co. also has a base in the master-planned Douglas Park nearby.
Anduril stressed that its headquarters will stay at the former site of the Los Angeles Times printing plant in Costa Mesa.
The campus is located approximately 30 minutes from its Costa Mesa headquarters and about 90 minutes from the company’s Capistrano test site, allowing teams to design, test, and iterate quickly across locations. This close physical integration is central to Anduril’s approach to rapid development and deployment.
Palmer Luckey, Ohio
Co-founded by Palmer Luckey, Anduril is also developing a giant campus near Columbus, Ohio, that is slated to employee 4,000 people and start weapons production later this year. It is expected to cost more than $2 billion.
Anduril said the new Long Beach site will also create “thousands” of indirect jobs generated through construction, security and supporting services, in addition to the 5,500 company employees.
The company also hearkened back to the region’s storied past in the aviation industry.
“Southern California has long been a center of American aerospace and defense innovation, and Long Beach sits at the heart of that ecosystem,” Anduril said. “Long Beach has played a central role in U.S. defense and industrial history for more than a century.”
The city became the Pacific Fleet’s home port in 1919 and, during World War II, was home to the nation’s largest aircraft production facility, where tens of thousands of workers built thousands of aircraft in support of the war effort.
Today, the broader region has become known as Space Beach, one of the fastest-growing hubs for space and defense companies in the United States.
