Anduril Eyes Nissan’s Oppama Plant to Mass-Produce Japanese Drones, Turning a Car Factory Into a Weapons Line

Anduril Industries is in talks to buy Nissan’s Oppama assembly plant in Yokosuka, Japan, and convert the 64-year-old car factory into a production site for military drones. Reuters broke the story on June 25, 2026, citing three people familiar with the negotiations. No deal has been signed, and Nissan says it is weighing other buyers, but the talks alone moved markets: Nissan’s Tokyo-listed shares jumped in afternoon trading on the report.

The Oppama site is not a small prize. Research labs, a proving ground, and wharf access sprawl across 1.7 million square meters (18.3 million square feet), and roughly 2,400 people work there. The plant opened in 1961, built around 18 million vehicles over six decades, and launched the Nissan Leaf in 2010. It sits next to Yokosuka naval base, home to Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force headquarters and the only forward-deployed U.S. Navy carrier strike group in the world. For a company that builds autonomous weapons, the location reads like a thesis statement.

I’ve been tracking Anduril’s manufacturing playbook since the company broke ground on its Ohio mega-factory, and this move follows the same logic on the other side of the Pacific. The difference is the host country, and that changes everything about how politically loaded this deal is.

Anduril Wants Japanese Drones Built With Japanese Parts

Anduril has spent a year laying the groundwork to manufacture inside Japan rather than ship hardware in. The company opened its Japanese unit, Anduril Industries Japan, in Tokyo in December 2025. To prove it could meet Japan’s domestic-content requirements, it built a prototype drone called Kizuna, meaning “bond” in Japanese, using only Japanese components. The Oppama talks are the logical next step: a physical line capable of turning that prototype into volume.

This matters because of how Japan normally buys American weapons. U.S. defense equipment built in Japan is typically produced under license by a domestic prime like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, not by a foreign company operating its own plant on Japanese soil. A wholly Anduril-run weapons factory would break that pattern, which is exactly why the deal could draw regulatory scrutiny under Japan’s Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act and questions about foreign control of defense production.

The political tailwind is real, though. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government is pushing to expand domestic arms manufacturing, driven by the fear that a Taiwan Strait crisis could pull Japan in and drain its weapons stocks faster than industry could replace them. Tokyo is expected to unveil a new national security strategy this year that could accelerate spending on drones and munitions. Japan has already designated drones as critical materials and set a target of 80,000 domestically produced units per year by 2030, against roughly 1,000 made domestically in 2024. That is the gap Anduril is positioning to fill.

The Ohio Template Goes International

Oppama is Anduril’s Arsenal-1 strategy exported. Arsenal-1, the company’s hyperscale factory near Columbus, Ohio, is a $900 million-plus, five-million-square-foot site designed to build tens of thousands of autonomous systems a year using commercial off-the-shelf parts and software-defined production lines. Fury combat drone production started there in March 2026, months ahead of the original July target, building on the YFQ-44A’s first flight in October 2025.

The thread connecting Ohio and Yokosuka is the auto industry. Anduril’s manufacturing pitch has always leaned on car-factory logic: standardized tooling, fast line reconfiguration, and a workforce trained on mass production rather than artisanal defense fabrication. The company already cites its collaboration with General Motors in the U.S. as a model for drone-maker and automaker cooperation. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi made the same point to the Japanese parliament in April. An idle Nissan plant full of people who already know how to build complex machines at scale is, by that logic, close to ideal. Anduril has offered to retrain Oppama’s workers to build defense gear instead of cars.

There is a personal dimension on the Japanese side too. Oppama sits in Koizumi’s parliamentary district. He met Anduril founder Palmer Luckey in December when Luckey was in Tokyo for the opening of the company’s Japanese unit, and Koizumi said afterward on X that Japan had “much to learn from Anduril.” A foreign defense firm reviving a shuttered factory with thousands of jobs in your own district is the kind of story a politician wants to be standing next to.

The Deal Still Has to Clear Several Hurdles

No purchase is locked in, and the conditions stacked in front of it are substantial. Nissan is talking to other potential buyers, has made no decision on the site’s future, and only confirmed it plans to close Oppama in 2028 as part of the “Re:Nissan” restructuring that consolidates production into Nissan Motor Kyushu. Anduril has not even decided how much of the 1.7-million-square-meter site it needs, and the sources did not say whether it has put a price on the table.

The bigger gate is demand. Anduril still needs procurement orders from Japan’s military to justify buying the plant at all. A factory with no contracts is just expensive real estate. Anduril declined to comment on what it called market speculation, saying only that it is working with Japan and exploring ways to strengthen local production. The company also faces competition for Japan’s emerging drone market from Ukrainian manufacturers whose hardware has been combat-tested against Russian forces, which is a credibility pitch Anduril’s own systems have struggled to match in Ukraine.

The company has the balance sheet to move if the contracts materialize. Anduril raised $5 billion in a Series H round in May 2026 at a $61 billion valuation, roughly double its mid-2025 figure, and reported $2.2 billion in 2025 revenue. It has also been collecting allied production deals at a fast clip, including a $20 billion U.S. Army counter-drone framework in March.

DroneXL’s Take

Strip away the “iPhone moment for Japanese defense” framing the press materials are pushing, and what’s actually happening here is cleaner and more interesting: an American startup is trying to do inside Japan what every serious drone power learned from Ukraine, which is that the side that can mass-produce cheap autonomous systems wins, and the side that buys boutique hardware on ten-year procurement cycles loses. Anduril figured out that the fastest path to mass production isn’t a greenfield defense plant. It’s a car factory with the lights still on and 2,400 people who already know how to build things at volume. Ohio proved the model. Yokosuka tests whether it travels.

I’ll say the quiet part out loud, because it’s the part that should interest American drone operators most. This is the same argument we’ve made about the DJI ban from the other direction. Capable, affordable, mass-produced drone hardware is a strategic asset, and the country that builds it sets the terms. The U.S. spent the last two years trying to wall DJI out of the American market on security grounds while its own service providers scrambled for affordable alternatives. Anduril, meanwhile, is busy locking up the manufacturing base in allied countries before the competition does. One of those is an industrial strategy. The other is a trade barrier wearing a national-security badge. Watch which one produces more drones.

The honest caveat: Anduril’s marketing has outrun its battlefield record before. We covered the Reuters investigation showing Ghost and Altius drones struggling against Russian jamming in Ukraine, where 96% of frontline drones in 2024 were Ukrainian-made. A factory doesn’t fix a hardware problem. If Anduril converts Oppama and the drones that roll off the line can’t survive contested airspace any better than the ones already in Ukraine, Japan will have traded a car plant for a very expensive lesson. The plant is the easy part. The drones still have to work.

Sources: Reuters, Business+IT (ビジネス+IT).

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.