Anduril to Build New Submarine Component Facility

The future Virginia class attack submarine USS Massachusetts (SSN-798) participated in sea trials in October of 2025. The future Massachusetts is the 25th Virginia class submarine produced through the combined efforts of HII-Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS) and General Dynamics Electric Boat. The U.S. Navy accepted delivery of the submarine from NNS on Nov. 21. HII photo Defense technology company Anduril will build a new facility in Maryland focused on submarine component construction for the U.S. Navy’s attack boats, according to a Tuesday announcement.

While Anduril will start with components like torpedo tubes, the company wants to work toward building submarine modules and eventually entire sections of the hull, an industry official told reporters.

“The very aspirational goal, kind of off in the future, is to be able to produce full ship sections, you know, bows, sterns, etc,” the official said during a Tuesday call. “Again, Anduril is not going to be producing entire submarines. That’s not our role. 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.”

The announcement, coordinated with the White House, comes as the Pentagon and Navy look for ways to speed up the construction of attack submarines to meet both the Navy’s own requirements and the obligation to the AUKUS security pact that will see the U.S. sell Virginia-class attack boats to Australia in the 2030s.

Anduril, for its part, plans to spend $3.7 billion of its own money to construct what the company calls a “software-defined shipyard” at Sparrows Point in Baltimore County. The company won a Navy contract worth as much as $2.9 billion that is contingent on “demonstrated production outcomes,” according to an Anduril news release.

“This contract structure ensures that Anduril, not the taxpayer, takes on the majority of the

execution risk, aligning incentives to ensure on-time, high-quality submarine production,” the release reads. “Altogether, this equates to a $6.6 billion investment in America’s submarine industrial base.”

Dubbed “Arsenal-2,” the facility would help expand the capacity of the submarine industrial base by adding 9 million labor hours each year, or a 15 percent increase for the Virginia-class program, a senior Trump administration official told reporters.

“Today that is one of the things that is what we refer to as a gating component that we need to be able to move forward with some of those Virginia-class submarines that are under construction,” the senior administration official said of the torpedo tubes. “So having those torpedo tubes there would let us, you know, move production of current Virginia submarines under construction faster.”

General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding build the Virginia-class boats in a teaming arrangement between the two yards.

“Newport News Shipbuilding welcomes all steps to expand industrial base capacity in support of submarine component manufacturing,” Newport News Shipbuilding president Kari Wilkinson said in a statement to USNI News. “We welcome Anduril as a future subcomponent partner in the important work of accelerating submarine deliveries to the fleet.”

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared Tuesday at Sparrows Point for a ceremony marking Anduril’s plans.

While Anduril says the Sparrows Point complex will be ready for production in 2030, the company will use a new Costa Mesa, Calif., facility to begin production two years sooner, according to the company release. Anduril has started building torpedo tube prototypes in California, the industry official said. That facility is SUBSAFE certified, an Anduril spokesperson confirmed to USNI News.

For the Maryland complex, Anduril will need to hire 3,100 people, and the project will lead to 11,000 “indirect jobs,” according to the company.

“We intend to be pulling folks from commercial aerospace and other kind[s] of commercial automotive, pulling them from, frankly, high schools and vocational schools for training this kind of workforce for this kind of work,” the industry executive said.

The new 2-million-square-foot facility will feature a 1,200-foot graving dock and the yard will have rail access. Anduril will also incorporate digitization and software throughout the yard.

“That covers everything from how the factory is laid out, how work moves through the factory in a logical way, how all of that work is managed with digital threads, how work is done in a digital way, automating things that you can automate, keeping digital records of things like precision-welding – so that you have traceability back to all the work that was done, and an ability to understand, in very precise detail for the purposes of certification and other types of kind of safety critical measures, what was done at what point all along the way – and having that traceability throughout the entire yard,” the industry official said.

This investment could help Anduril gain the expertise needed to build unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) or it could provide a stable business line for the company compared to other more unpredictable pursuits, Hudson Institute naval analyst Bryan Clark told USNI News.

“There’s only so much you can do when you’re talking about a highly regulated set of parts like submarine parts,” said Clark, a former submariner. “The supply chains are very tight, so it’s not like Anduril’s going to be able to run out and get a commercial alternative for some of these SUBSAFE or nuclear parts.”

The announcement comes one week after Hegseth unveiled a new initiative called Project Meridian that includes Anduril chief executive officer Palmer Luckey as a “co-director” assessing the future of warfare.

Sparrows Point sits on the Patapsco River, just south of Baltimore. The site was once the home of the Bethlehem Sparrows Point Shipyard, which was owned by Bethlehem Steel. Bethlehem Steel was the parent company of the nearby Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyard that built the World War II-era Liberty ships.