Next-generation defense contractor Anduril Industries has inked another massive lease in Orange County, for a creative office campus that sits next to its main headquarters in Costa Mesa.
The eight-year-old, tech-heavy firm co-founded by Palmer Luckey, which has grown to a valuation topping $30 billion following a $2.5 billion fund raise in June, last week completed a deal to take over The Hive, a three-building campus that previously held the base for the Los Angeles Chargers football team.
The trio of offices along S. Susan Street totals about 190,000 square feet.
Anduril’s latest deal marks the largest office lease in Orange County in four years, according to data from real estate tracker CoStar.
Top Tenant
Anduril now leases close to 1.5 million square feet of office and warehouse space in Orange County, 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 over the past year.
Much of the company’s space is within a few blocks of its headquarters at the intersection of Harbor Boulevard and Sunflower Avenue; its main campus, known as The Press, runs about 640,000 square feet.
That aptly named site was previously home to the former OC bureau of the Los Angeles Times and its printing facility before being repurposed as a creative office campus.
Anduril’s lease for The Press, completed about four years ago, is the largest office lease in OC in over a decade.
Anduril has been OC’s most active tenant in 2025, signing deals for close to 700,000 square feet for a mix of offices and new industrial buildings in both Costa Mesa and Santa Ana, factoring in the Hive lease, Business Journal research indicates.
Outside OC, the maker of autonomous drones, fighter jets, submarines and surveillance equipment this year announced plans for a factory complex for Columbus, Ohio, where it’s building a $1 billion facility that will have 5 million square feet of space.
Anduril employs about 3,200 in Orange County, according to Business Journal data.
Hive Sale
The new lease comes in tandem with a sale of the three-building office campus.
San Francisco-based commercial real estate investor Drawbridge Realty announced on Oct. 9 its purchase of The Hive.
Property records indicate the campus sold for about $78 million, or roughly $410 per square foot. Larger offices in OC have been trading closer to $200 to $250 per square foot, on average, this year.
The seller of the campus was Invesco Real Estate, which paid a reported $84 million for the property in 2018.
Eastdil Secured brokered the sales transaction, while Tucker Hughes of Hughes Marino represented Anduril in its lease negotiations.
Drawbridge said in a statement that during the transaction, it entered negotiations with Anduril to lease the entire Hive campus on a long-term basis. The lease was signed on the same day that the sales transaction closed.
“The Hive underscores our commitment to investing in high-quality assets backed by strong credit tenants,” said Charlie McEachron, CEO of Drawbridge.
Other local properties owned by Drawbridge include Santa Ana’s 390,000-square-foot Pacific Center.
Collectors Holdings, an authenticator of baseball cards and other memorabilia, and another one of OC’s larger office tenants, uses that complex for its base.
Change of Plans
The Los Angeles Chargers used The Hive as their base of operations after the football team moved here from San Diego. This year, the team relocated again to a newly-built facility in El Segundo. It plays its home games in Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium.
The Hive, which runs about 14 acres, has a practice football field on site. New property owner Drawbridge Realty said that three-acre plot of land holds development potential.
The entire office campus was eyed for a much larger development before the just-completed sale.
Dubbed Hive Live, the site’s prior owners, in partnership with Legacy Partners, envisioned building 1,050 apartments at the property, along with retail. That project got approvals from Costa Mesa’s planning commission this June but didn’t break ground.
