Anduril Industries, one of the leading defense companies in Southern California, will expand in Long Beach with a new $1-billion complex near the city’s airport.

Anduril is developing new defense technologies that include drones, missiles, robotic submarines, and autonomous fighter jets. The Long Beach operation will include offices for designer engineers and coders, along with lab space and prototype manufacturing facilities, the company said Thursday.

The new facility will be built at Douglas Park, an industrial park just north of Long Beach Airport with a history of aerospace manufacturing. Anduril has leased more than 1 million square feet of land from real estate developer Sares Regis Group, which will build the new campus.

Construction will begin by the middle of the year, Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm said, and the first building in the complex will open by the end of 2027.

The campus will span approximately 1.18 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.

“As we look at the next five to 10 years of growth for the company, we’re going to be embarking on a whole bunch of new programs,” Grimm said. “That means we’re going to need to hire people.”

While many businesses have complained about the high level of taxes and regulations in the state and threatened to move, most find they need to stay because of its hard-to-beat network of companies and deep pool of experienced defense workers.

“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 said.

Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone at the company is happy about everything that happens in the state. The company’s outspoken, billionaire co-founder, Luckey Palmer, recently joined the debate about a proposed new tax on billionaires.

The tax proposal, which still needs to gather enough signatures before it can even get on the ballot for a vote in November, is flawed, Palmer said, because it would give company founders huge tax bills they could not afford to pay.

“It makes founder-led companies practically illegal,” he posted on X.

Anduril’s new Long Beach facility will employ about 5,500 workers, with thousands more indirect jobs generated through construction, security, and supporting services, Grimm said.

“We’re going to need to have design labs and machine shops and test labs and test chambers and all the sorts of industrial types of support facilities for these folks,” he said.

The campus is a 30-minute drive from Anduril’s Costa Mesa headquarters and about 90 minutes from the company’s Capistrano test site, the company said, allowing teams to design, test, and iterate quickly across locations.

Anduril has about 7,000 employees in 35 different locations, including international offices, Grimm said. About half of the workers are based in Southern California.

Anduril’s decision to come to Long Beach marks a new chapter in the city’s role as a defense industry bastion that once included a naval base and aerospace manufacturing, including the legendary B-17 bomber of World War II, and more recently the C-17 Globemaster III military transport, still widely in use.

“We have a big history of building complex aircraft here, and we see this as an additional step toward building the next generation of aircraft and technology,” Mayor Rex Richardson said. “Over the last few years, we’ve become one of the fastest-growing aerospace clusters in America.”

Other large new players include spacecraft company Rocket Lab, space-station builder Vast and aviation start-up JetZero, said Richardson, who favors the city’s new nickname “Space Beach.”

“You can liken them to the next generation of the Boeings and the Northrup Grummans,” he said of new aerospace companies in town.

In 2025 Anduril announced it would spend $1 billion to erect its first “Arsenal” manufacturing plant in Columbus, Ohio.

Arsenal-1 will use a common set of commercial manufacturing tooling, machinery, and processes for every type of autonomous vehicle that Anduril produces, the company said. It is set to open this year.