Anduril won a contract worth up to $2.9 billion with the U.S. Navy on Tuesday to boost submarine production, days after its co-founder Palmer Luckey was named to a Pentagon Future Weapons Task Force.
The company is also investing $3.7 billion to develop a new shipyard at Sparrows Point, outside Baltimore, Maryland, which is expected to begin operations in 2030 and create approximately 3,100 jobs.
Anduril said the 2 million square foot facility will build components for the Virginia-class submarine. Some parts, including the torpedo tubes, will be manufactured in a 160,000 square foot factory in Orange County, California.
“It’s about putting more food on the table and being able to meet the demands of our country to produce more submarines,” Chris Brose, Anduril’s president and chief strategy officer, said during a press briefing.
The deal comes days after the Defense Department asked Luckey to join a new initiative called Project Meridian aimed at identifying and developing capabilities for future U.S. conflicts, raising questions about defense technology’s growing influence in Washington as companies compete for government contracts.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and EspaceX CEO Elon Musk is also part of the project. SpaceX and Anduril are actively working with the US government.
Defense technology companies and their executives have seen their influence grow in Washington in recent months as President Donald Trump seeks to bolster U.S. military capabilities, including shipbuilding.
Marc Andreessen, whose venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invests billions in defense technology companies including Anduril, was named to the Pentagon’s defense policy council this summer, alongside Thiel Capital’s Blake Masters.
Anduril is widely known for building drones and autonomous vehicles. Over the summer, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company would be in talks to build drone boats at the site.
Brose said the facility would focus on the Virginia-class submarine program, illustrating the growing defense contractor’s move into conventional shipbuilding.
“Our goal here is to be a critical and hopefully over time a much larger and growing part of the supply chain for our major shipbuilders,” he said. “And over time, we hope these will become very large sections of the ship.”
The massive vessels are built by General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries. This summer, General Dynamics won a $76.6 billion award to build submarines.
“This is an opportunity to really reimagine how a shipyard is built and how that work is done, and that’s just not something that our current industrial base has the luxury of doing,” Brose said.
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