Anduril, the AI defense company founded by tech billionaire and VR headset mogul Palmer Luckey, announced plans to build a factory in Columbus, Ohio on Thursday. They’re calling the plant Arsenal-1, claim it will be a “hyperscale” facility, and promise it’ll bring more than 4,000 jobs to the region.
“Arsenal-1 represents a step forward in how we manufacture the autonomous systems and weapons that our nation and our allies need to remain secure,” Brian Chimpf, Anduril’s CEO, said in a press release about the factory.
Anduril, along with other Tolkien-named companies like Palantir and Sauron, represent a new kind of Silicon Valley. One that’s focused on America and willing to manufacture a massive amount of weapons for it. Luckey, who founded the company in 2017 after leaving Meta, has called himself a propagandist who will “twist the truth” to “put forward only my version if I think that it’s going to propagandize people to what I need them to believe.”
The Hawaiin shirt-wearing arms dealer has been busy. One of its best-selling products is the Sentry Tower, a portable solar-powered surveillance tower that works autonomously and is scattered along the U.S. southern border. The 33-foot tall tower has helped create a “digital” border and feeds its data into Lattice, an Anduril AI pattern recognition system.
In November of last year, the U.S. Marines awarded Anduril a $200 million contract to develop a counter-drone system. A month before that it got a $249 million contract to deliver 500 of its Roadrunner-Ms to the Pentagon. The Roadrunner is an autonomous weapon system that’s a little bit of a cruise missile and a little bit of a drone. U.S. Special Operations Command is already using the Roadrunner. In 2022, SOCOM and Anduril announced an almost $1 billion contract.
So Anduril has a lot of weapons it needs to build and it looks like Ohio will be the place. Anduril told reporters that the factory in Ohio will mostly be for making Fury and Roadrunner drones and Baracuda autonomous missiles. The hyperscale factory will go up near the Rickenbacker International Airport. The plan is for it to span five million square feet but it can scale up across an additional 500 acres. It’ll join the extant list of Anduril factories in Rhode Island, Mississippi, Georgia, and Australia.
Anduril was already in Ohio. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has long had plans to deploy its surveillance towers in the Great Lakes region of the country to monitor the Canadian border.
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