Anduril announced on Tuesday morning that it will break ground on a new facility in Baltimore County, Maryland, to build critical components for Virginia-class submarines.
The company has committed $3.7 billion of its own capital to the shipyard, more than the $2.9 billion contract it got from the Navy for the two-million-square-foot facility, which will be called Arsenal-2. It will be built at Tradepoint Atlantic.
Anduril’s financial contribution will go to “the cost of standing up the facility, building the workforce, filling it with modern technology, and other capabilities required to do the work that we will be tasked with,” Chris Brose, the president and chief strategy officer of Anduril, told reporters.
Anduril hopes to break ground as soon as it can, though an industry official acknowledged, “It’s not really coming online until a couple of years.” In the meantime, however, Anduril is standing up another facility in California that will be operational much faster, and it is already “beginning to prototype and produce torpedo tubes based on design information that our partners at Electric Boat flowed down to us.”
Brose noted that the effort is “really kind of 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. Taking what are very complex tasks performed by very skilled workers and breaking them into a larger number of simpler tasks that a larger workforce can contribute to much faster.”
It will be producing torpedo tubes, which is critical, because they are needed “to be able to move forward, so having those torpedo tubes earlier would let us move production of current Virginia submarines under construction faster,” the administration official added.
President Donald Trump is set to travel to the site of the future facility on Tuesday afternoon with other administration and Navy officials.
Brose praised the president’s push for the Navy to build more submarines, saying this announcement “just never would have happened without the leadership of President Trump, the leadership of the Department of the War, and the Department of the Navy.”
The talks between Anduril and the Navy date back to late 2024 regarding this manufacturing facility, according to the industry official, who noted that “what really kicked it into high gear and just changed the context entirely was the president coming in [to office] in January [2025].”
Virginia-class submarines are built by General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding. Anduril is not replacing them, but is seeking to become “a critical and hopefully over time much larger and growing part of the supply chain for our lead shipbuildings,” the industrial official added.
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The Navy currently has 26 Virginia-class submarines, and two more are expected to be completed in the spring, the administration official added, though the overall production of submarines has been a long-standing challenge for the Navy due to workforce shortages and supply chain hiccups.
Vice Adm. Robert Gaucher was named the Pentagon’s first direct-reporting portfolio manager for submarines earlier this year, overseeing the production of the Virginia – and Columbia-class submarines.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the Newport News shipyard back in January, and during his address to manufacturing workers, he highlighted the capabilities of Virginia-class submarines.
“This Virginia-class submarine is a paragon of American engineering and fighting spirit,” he said, referencing the USS Oklahoma, which he was standing under at the time. “It is the apex predator of the undersea domain and the most advanced and lethal submarine ever built.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
