Anduril, the AI defense company founded by tech billionaire and VR headset mogul Palmer Luckey, announced plans to build a factory in Columbus, Ohio on Thursday. They’re calling the plant Arsenal-1, claim it will be a “hyperscale” facility, and promise it’ll bring more than 4,000 jobs to the region. “Arsenal-1 represents a step forward in how we manufacture the autonomous systems and weapons that our nation and our allies need to remain secure,” Brian Chimpf, Anduril’s CEO, said in a press release about the factory. Anduril, along with other Tolkien-named companies like Palantir and Sauron, represent a new kind of Silicon Valley. One that’s focused on America and willing to manufacture a massive amount of weapons for it. Luckey, who founded the company in 2017 after leaving Meta, has called himself a propagandist who will “twist the truth” to “put forward only my version if I think that it’s going to propagandize people to what I need them to believe.” The Hawaiin shirt-wearing arms dealer has been busy. One of its best-selling products is the Sentry Tower, a portable solar-powered surveillance tower that works autonomously and is scattered along the U.S. southern border. The 33-foot tall tower has helped create a “digital” border and feeds its data into Lattice, an Anduril AI pattern recognition system.

Full report : A.I. Military Start-Up Anduril Plans $1 Billion Factory in Ohio.