Anduril Industries plans to invest $3.7 billion to build a massive new shipyard in Baltimore to produce sections of Virginia-class attack submarines. The project marks a return to large-scale shipbuilding at a site where Bethlehem Steel once built ships for the U.S. military.
The 2-million-square-foot facility at Sparrows Point is expected to create 14,000 jobs, including more than 3,100 permanent jobs and thousands more indirect and construction jobs, company executives, Trump administration officials and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore told reporters. Anduril expects the shipyard, dubbed Arsenal-2, to begin hiring in 2029 and launch operations in 2030.
President Donald Trump is expected to formally announce the project Tuesday alongside Anduril executives and senior Navy and Pentagon officials. The Navy has awarded Anduril a production contract of up to $2.9 billion for submarine components and not the facility itself, with federal funding expected to come through future budgets.
“This is a massive new project that’s going to deliver the largest private investment and create the most jobs in Maryland in well over a decade, and so that makes it one of the largest economic projects in our state’s history,” Moore said. “One interesting fact is that this project is going to bring more jobs back to Sparrows Point than were retained by Bethlehem Steel in the last half century.”
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The Bethlehem Steel mill at Sparrows Point in Baltimore County permanently closed in 2012, and the site has since been redeveloped into the 3,300-acre Tradepoint Atlantic, a logistics and industrial hub. Anduril said it has a long-term lease with Tradepoint.
The new investment comes as the Navy struggles to increase production of Virginia-class submarines, which are nuclear-powered boats designed to hunt enemy submarines and ships, conduct surveillance and strike targets on land.Administration officials said the Anduril facility would add about a 15 percent increase in production capacity. The torpedo tubes Anduril plans to procure are a bottleneck for submarines already under production.
Maryland and Baltimore County have committed to providing incentives worth up to 13% of Anduril’s anticipated private investment through existing economic development programs and new appropriations that would require approval by the Maryland General Assembly and the Baltimore County Council, Moore said. The state also plans to invest in a workforce training center to support the facility.
Anduril’s entry represents a large bet by the fast-growing defense-tech company that has little track record in the heavy industrial work required to build nuclear-powered subs.
Though the Navy typically purchases two Virginia-class submarines each year, the industry has recently been completing only about 1.1 to 1.2 per year. The Anduril shipyard is part of a broader push to catch up to that demand and potentially expand it.
The Pentagon and Congress have poured billions of dollars into expanding the submarine industrial base, which includes the shipyards, suppliers and workers needed to build and maintain the fleet. Part of that involves shifting some submarine construction to manufacturers outside of Electric Boat and Newport News, the only two U.S. shipyards that build nuclear-powered ships.
Anduril is best known for autonomous weapons and drones, but the 9-year-old firm is building a 5-million-square-foot complex in Columbus, Ohio, designed to mass-produce missiles, drones and other weapons.
The firm has already begun prototyping torpedo tubes at a facility it is opening in California and plans to move that work to Baltimore as Arsenal-2 comes online. If it can meet the Navy’s certification and safety requirements, it would eventually expand into larger modules and eventually entire bow and stern sections, Anduril President and Chief Strategy Officer Chris Brose said.
Those sections, known in the industry as “super modules,” would be transported by water to General Dynamics Electric Boat in Connecticut and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, where they would be incorporated into submarines. Those two companies would continue performing final assembly, testing and delivery to the Navy.
Brose acknowledged that the Baltimore project represents a new direction and said the company was initially skeptical when the Navy approached it about joining the Virginia-class program.But he said Anduril executives concluded the company could bring modern manufacturing techniques, software and factory design to an industry facing production bottlenecks and shipyards with aging infrastructure.
“The more we studied this, the deeper we’ve got into it, the more we realized that as a company we really do have something to offer here, and you know, shame on us if we didn’t help,” he said.
Anduril would approach submarine manufacturing in its own way, Brose said, similar to its Arsenal-1 complex. Rather than requiring the highly skilled laborers the industry struggles to find, it would break down portions of the manufacturing process into smaller, simpler jobs that less experienced workers can perform.
“We’re going to approach how you build submarines differently,” Brose said. “We’re not getting involved in this to build submarines the exact same way that they have been built for decades.”
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly described Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s role in Tuesday’s announcement. He is scheduled to attend a separate announcement in the Tradepoint area later in the day.
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