Anduril plans shipyard to manufacture parts for US Navy’s top submarines

Anduril announced plans to build a “software-defined shipyard” to supply critical components for the US Navy’s most advanced submarines, signalling the Silicon Valley firm’s latest move into the heart of the country’s defence establishment.

The upstart drone and missile maker, founded by Palmer Luckey in 2017, will receive $2.9bn from the US Navy and invest $3.7bn of its own capital in a new 2mn square foot “Arsenal-2” facility at Sparrows Point, Maryland.

The components made at the facility, which once hosted a Bethlehem Steel mill, will be used in Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines. Anduril’s shipyard is expected to create about 3,000 direct jobs and begin production in 2030.

The announcement on Tuesday comes as the Trump administration attempts to reform Pentagon procurement in order to reduce dependence on leading “prime” contractors in favour of a new generation of AI-savvy defence tech firms.

It also reflects alarm in Washington about the moribund state of the US shipbuilding industry and the ability of American naval shipyards to keep up with the industrial might of their Chinese counterparts.

The Virginia-class programme, which is overseen by prime contractors General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls Industries, is supposed to build at a rate of more than two boats a year in order to meet the US Navy’s requirements and meet US commitments to sell nuclear attack submarines to Australia as part of the Aukus defence agreement.

But in recent years it has managed little over one boat a year, amid the demands of other programmes as well as chronic skill shortages and an over-reliance on a small number of boutique component suppliers — issues that have dogged the wider US defence industrial base as it struggles to increase production of missiles and other weapons.

Anduril is playing a prominent role in Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defence initiative, and last week Trump’s defence secretary Pete Hegseth appointed Luckey and SpaceX founder Elon Musk alongside former House speaker Newt Gingrich to a task force examining the future of US warfare, technology and defence procurement.

Christian Brose, Anduril’s president, told reporters on Tuesday that “the core insight the [Trump] administration had and the navy had is we just need new production capacity. We need to grow the maritime industrial base, the submarine industrial base.”

In an example of how companies are deploying so-called “physical AI” to accelerate the automation of manufacturing systems, the Sparrows Point facility will use Anduril’s software to “connect fabrication workflows, outfitting sequences, material movement, inspection protocols and documentation requirements in a single system”, the company said in a statement.

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Brose said the new shipyard was “really about taking advantage of manufacturing revolutions that are occurring in our commercial aerospace and other commercial industries, bringing software and other digital technologies in, really kind of reconceiving how the work is done”.

It marks Anduril’s latest step into shipbuilding following its announcement in 2025 that it was partnering with Korean shipbuilding giant HD Hyundai Heavy Industries to produce a new class of “autonomous surface vehicles” designed to confront Chinese attempts to “challenge freedom of navigation across expanding areas in the Pacific.”

The company last year opened a facility in Sydney, Australia, where it manufactures its Ghost Shark autonomous undersea vehicles.