Anduril, the AI protection firm based by tech billionaire and VR headset mogul Palmer Luckey, introduced plans to construct a manufacturing facility in Columbus, Ohio on Thursday. They’re calling the plant Arsenal-1, declare will probably be a “hyperscale” facility, and promise it’ll deliver greater than 4,000 jobs to the area.
“Arsenal-1 represents a step ahead in how we manufacture the autonomous programs and weapons that our nation and our allies want to stay safe,” Brian Chimpf, Anduril’s CEO, mentioned in a press launch in regards to the manufacturing facility.
Anduril, together with different Tolkien-named firms like Palantir and Sauron, symbolize a brand new sort of Silicon Valley. One that’s targeted on America and prepared to fabricate a large quantity of weapons for it. Luckey, who based the corporate in 2017 after leaving Meta, has referred to as himself a propagandist who will “twist the reality” to “put ahead solely my model if I believe that it’s going to propagandize individuals to what I would like them to imagine.”
The Hawaiin shirt-wearing arms vendor has been busy. One of its best-selling merchandise is the Sentry Tower, a transportable solar-powered surveillance tower that works autonomously and is scattered alongside the U.S. southern border. The 33-foot tall tower has helped create a “digital” border and feeds its information into Lattice, an Anduril AI sample recognition system.
In November of final 12 months, the U.S. Marines awarded Anduril a $200 million contract to develop a counter-drone system. A month earlier than that it obtained a $249 million contract to ship 500 of its Roadrunner-Ms to the Pentagon. The Roadrunner is an autonomous weapon system that’s a little bit little bit of a cruise missile and a little bit little bit of a drone. U.S. Special Operations Command is already utilizing the Roadrunner. In 2022, SOCOM and Anduril introduced an virtually $1 billion contract.
So Anduril has lots of weapons it must construct and it appears to be like like Ohio would be the place. Anduril instructed reporters that the manufacturing facility in Ohio will largely be for making Fury and Roadrunner drones and Baracuda autonomous missiles. The hyperscale manufacturing facility will go up close to the Rickenbacker International Airport. The plan is for it to span 5 million sq. toes however it could actually scale up throughout an extra 500 acres. It’ll be a part of the extant listing of Anduril factories in Rhode Island, Mississippi, Georgia, and Australia.
Anduril was already in Ohio. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has lengthy had plans to deploy its surveillance towers within the Great Lakes area of the nation to observe the Canadian border.
