ASHVILLE, Ohio — The circuit boards at the heart of Anduril Industries’ new BlueChip ruggedized laptop will be assembled at the company’s Arsenal-1 facility in Ashville, Pickaway County, putting a piece of a national push to rebuild American computer manufacturing in southern Ohio.
Anduril and Qualcomm announced BlueChip on Tuesday, Oct. 27 — a rugged laptop built for government, defense and first-responder users, designed to run Anduril’s Lattice software natively on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Series processors. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that circuit board assembly for the machines will take place at Arsenal-1, Anduril’s Pickaway County production site, where the company’s workforce passed 300 employees this month.
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey said early BlueChip units will be built in small quantities at Arsenal-1, with full-rate production following next year, and that orders will open in 2027. The first-generation machine’s bill of materials is about 90 percent U.S. and allied-nation sourcing, according to the companies; the display panel remains the exception, sourced from China because no domestic alternative exists. Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon said the Snapdragon chips themselves are to be manufactured at TSMC’s Arizona plant.
“These computers are the anti-surveillance computer,” Luckey said at the launch.
The machines will ship with Windows 11 or a choice of two Linux distributions. Interest from the military so far is informal, the companies said — no procurement contracts were announced Tuesday. Luckey estimated the rugged-computer market at about $5 billion.
Arsenal-1 is the same Pickaway County complex where Anduril is building out production for its autonomous systems, and the BlueChip work adds a second product line to the site: not just the aircraft and sensors the facility was announced for, but the computers intended to control them.
