Anduril–Navy Submarine Program

The story so far

As of October 6, 2026

Anduril Industries and the U.S. Navy are putting $6.6 billion into a new shipyard at Tradepoint Atlantic in Baltimore County to make critical parts for Virginia-class submarines. Anduril’s share is a $3.7 billion private investment to build a more than 2 million–square-foot facility called Arsenal‑2, paired with a Navy contract worth up to $2.9 billion. The project is billed for about 3,100 direct jobs and is slated to begin operations in 2030.

This is the Navy trying to fix a production bottleneck. Deliveries of Virginia-class boats have slipped because the network of shipyards and suppliers is short on capacity and skilled labor. The primes, General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls’ Newport News, will remain the builders; Anduril is being added to make more of the hard-to-produce pieces. The plan starts with torpedo tubes and moves to larger sections such as bows and sterns, with early tube work also staged at a 160,000‑square‑foot site in Orange County, California. Officials put the added work at roughly 9 million labor hours a year, about a 15 percent lift to the program’s throughput.

The test now is not the announcement but the execution: building a workforce at Sparrows Point that can meet nuclear‑submarine tolerances, proving quality on pressure‑holding parts, and integrating on schedule with the primes’ assembly lines. Maryland and Baltimore County said they will match up to 13 percent of Anduril’s investment through incentives that still need legislative approval, reflecting how central workforce training and supplier financing are to making the numbers real. The economic stakes named for the region are large, including more than 13,000 direct and indirect jobs and about $2 billion a year in output.

One fact sharpening the spotlight is timing. The Navy’s award to Anduril came days after co‑founder Palmer Luckey was named to a new Pentagon group studying future weapons. That linkage ensures this shipyard will be read as part of a broader shift, in which fast‑growing defense tech firms move from software and drones into the heaviest parts of the arsenal. The underlying driver is straightforward: the Navy needs more Virginia‑class capacity, sooner, and has turned to new suppliers with private capital to get it.