Cold War City: AI weapons factory from Anduril planned for Columbus

In the Bloomberg Originals video “Palmer Luckey Wants to Be Silicon Valley’s War King,” journalist Emily Chang asked Palmer Luckey, the founder of weapons company Anduril, a simple question: “China and Taiwan, how does this play out?” 

“Everything that Anduril is working on on the [research and development] side is oriented towards that fight right now,” Luckey responded.

On Jan. 16, Anduril announced the selection of Columbus as the location of its “Arsenal-1” manufacturing facility for autonomous weapons and vehicles, including drones, helicopters, and jets. The massive facility, planned for a site adjacent to Rickenbacker Airport, would be larger than the Intel plant and would create 4,000 jobs, the company claims.

“Ohio is the ideal location for Anduril’s first Arsenal factory with its robust infrastructure to support Anduril’s unique needs, a highly skilled and diverse manufacturing workforce, and a legacy of leadership in aerospace and defense,” Anduril wrote in a statement announcing the project. 

Labeling itself a “defence technology company” on its website, Luckey said Anduril operates differently from contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which get paid for their time, materials, and a percentage of profit on top. “Of course, that incentivizes you to come up with expensive solutions and to drag it out as long as you can,” Luckey said in the video. 

Anduril, in contrast, sells its products directly, which Luckey said incentivizes the company to make weapons cheaper and more efficiently. The manufacturer currently has multiple contracts with the U.S. government, including a $99.7 million contract to deliver its AI data analysis software, Lattice, for the U.S. Space Systems Command, and a $250 million Pentagon contract for pulsar jammers and 500 reusable, anti-drone Roadrunner vehicles. 

Anduril is seeking to challenge the stranglehold that Boeing and Lockheed Martin have on the weapons market by bringing tech-minded competition to the military industrial complex. There’s perhaps no better location to make this attempt than Columbus, Ohio, a place to which other former Silicon Valley venture capitalists have previously flocked, including JD Vance and Mark Kvamme.

Born in Long Beach in 1992, Luckey would seem in many ways a caricature of what Californians and the rest of America see as a Silicon Valley CEO. He is always wearing cargo shorts, flip flops, and oversized Hawaiian shirts. (Even in Ohio, his jacket remained open to reveal the flowered button-down underneath.) His social media is full of video games, anime, and tasteless memes. He owns a small warship, a military Humvee, six helicopters (at one point seven, but he downsized), and the largest video game collection in the world, which he stores safely 200 feet underground in one of his decommissioned nuclear missile bases, which he also collects. 

The founder of Anduril was not always occupied with automating the art of war. In fact, he made his money pioneering the virtual reality company Oculus, which he almost called StepN2theGAME, according to his blog. He first experimented with the Oculus technology in his parents’ basement at age 16. Facebook bought the company for $2 billion in 2014, parting ways with Luckey three years later. (Luckey claimed he was fired by Facebook in part for making a donation to a pro-Trump group.)

These days, Luckey maintains that he’s not a very political person, though his X account shows a kind of reserved support for Trump and a distaste for the Biden years. 

Luckey’s purported disinterest in politics does not extend to foreign policy. Claiming that Anduril is most concerned with China’s potential invasion of Taiwan and labeling online critics as employing “pro-CCP apologism,” Luckey could rightly be described as a Cold Warrior. He regrets doing business in China during his Oculus years and believes that he was a part of the problem, helping them, even in a small way, to dominate the world in certain markets and technologies. His company Anduril could be perceived as an attempt at redemption, with Luckey seeking to offset past blunders by building a new fleet of weapons that he believes will one day be deployed against China.

In an Op-Ed for The Wall Street Journal titled “Silicon Valley should stop ostracizing the military,” Luckey wrote:

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are right: A global leader in artificial intelligence will emerge, achieving enormous international clout and the power to dictate the rules governing AI. As Americans working in the technology industry, we disagree with those leaders only about which country that should be.

Luckey’s Cold War convictions are becoming increasingly prevalent in the Midwest. The construction of the Intel plant in New Albany, for example, has been cast as a new Cold War effort to beat China in a chip war. 

But the Anduril facility marks a shift from the economic competition advanced by the CHIPs Act and toward the prospect of an outright military conflict. If Intel cemented central Ohio as the tech center of the Silicon Heartland, Anduril is an attempt to secure Columbus as the future of the military tech sector, bridging AI and weapons in the name of wars to come. In another interview with Bloomberg, Luckey claimed that he already has a “strong relationship” with Taiwan, securing a recent deal with the country. He also claimed that Anduril has since been sanctioned by China.

Fittingly, when the new Anduril facility was announced, the company’s chief strategy officer, Chris Brose, said that “America’s next arsenal of democracy will be made in Ohio.”

The future of the Midwest is increasingly being dictated by right-wing venture capitalists from Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech entrepreneur who famously wrote that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible,” helped JD Vance to get his start (both in finance and politics) and also happened to be an early backer of Anduril. Mark Kvamme, the Silicon Valley transplant and former head of JobsOhio, told a crowd in 2018: “I truly believe that Columbus, Ohio, and … the greater Midwest is going to be and has the potential to be the economic driver of the country going forward.”

With the looming shift towards autonomous weapons manufacturing, Columbus is flipping the Mark Twain quote in which he said that “an inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war.”

Today, it appears that peace, or anything but an inglorious war, would be considered dishonorable.