Anduril Lands $2.9B Navy Contract, Plans $3.7B Baltimore Shipyard

The U.S. Navy on Tuesday awarded Anduril a contract worth up to $2.9 billion to help stand up a new submarine-components shipyard outside Baltimore, CNBC reports, with the Silicon Valley defense firm committing $3.7 billion of its own capital toward a total announced $6.6 billion program.

The facility, dubbed Arsenal-2, will sit on the former Bethlehem Steel site at Tradepoint Atlantic in Sparrows Point. Anduril describes it as a more than two-million-square-foot "software-defined shipyard," with hiring beginning in 2029 and operations starting in 2030. The company projects about 3,100 direct jobs, more than 14,000 indirect jobs, and $2 billion in annual economic output for Maryland.

The plant will feed General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII's Newport News Shipbuilding, the two yards that jointly build Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines. Anduril President and Chief Strategy Officer Chris Brose said the company will start with "critical components, including torpedo tubes" before scaling into larger modules and ship sections such as bows and sterns. A senior administration official told reporters that torpedo tubes are among the "components limiting progress on some Virginia-class submarines already under construction."

The award lands days after co-founder Palmer Luckey was named to a Pentagon future weapons task force, timing that extends a run of coverage we have been tracking in our Anduril stream this year.

That ambition is not matched by near-term delivery. Arsenal-2's first operations are four years out, the Navy's $2.9 billion is a ceiling value rather than a firm obligation, and nuclear-rated submarine components are a different qualification regime than the autonomy software and drones that have defined Anduril to date.