Anduril said Tuesday it won a contract worth as much as $2.9 billion intended to help the Navy build more submarines. The announcement landed just days after co-founder Palmer Luckey was tapped for a new Pentagon future weapons initiative called Project Meridian, putting a spotlight on defense tech's growing footprint in Washington.
To expand facilities at Sparrows Point just beyond Baltimore, Maryland, the company will invest $3.7 billion, aiming to start operations in 2030. Anduril said the project should generate roughly 3,100 jobs and span 2 million square feet, producing components for the Virginia-class submarine. Some of those pieces, including torpedo tubes, will be produced at an Orange County, California facility measuring 160,000 square feet.
"This is about putting more food on the table and being able to meet the requirements that our country has to produce more submarines," said Anduril President and Chief Strategy Officer Chris Brose during a press briefing.
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Brose said the Sparrows Point effort centers on the Virginia-class program, signaling a deeper push into traditional shipbuilding for the fast-rising defense contractor. "Our goal here is to be a critical, and hopefully, over time, much larger and growing part of the supply chain for our lead shipbuilders," he said. "And over time, we hope that'll grow up to very large sections of the ship." He added, "This is an opportunity to really reimagine how a shipyard is built and how this work is done, and that's just not something that our current industrial base has the luxury of doing."
Project Meridian counts former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk among its members, and the U.S. government is currently engaging with SpaceX as well as Anduril. In the past few months, defense tech firms have expanded their influence in Washington, D.C., while President Donald Trump pushes to bolster U.S. military capacity, including shipbuilding. Over the summer, the Pentagon's defense policy board added Marc Andreessen, joining Thiel Capital's Blake Masters; Andreessen Horowitz invests billions in defense tech firms, including Anduril. Anduril is best known for autonomous drones and vessels, and the Wall Street Journal reported this summer that the company was in talks to build drone boats at the Sparrows Point location.
The Virginia-class submarines themselves are built by General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries. This summer, General Dynamics landed a Navy contract worth $76.6 billion to construct submarines. For everyday investors, the takeaway is straightforward: this ties Anduril more tightly into a long-running, capital-heavy Navy program while underscoring how newer defense tech firms are muscling into major government production work.
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