Germany’s Helsing, one of Europe’s most valuable defense startups, is bringing its drone production onto American soil. The company has picked Martinsburg, West Virginia, for its first U.S. factory, a $50 million plant that will build the HX-2 strike drone at scale.
That puts a foreign manufacturer inside the U.S. industrial base at the exact moment Washington is pushing to build far more drones, far faster, and far cheaper than it does today.
What Helsing Is Building In Appalachia
The Martinsburg site, in Berkeley County in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, carries a $50 million investment and is set to create at least 60 full-time jobs at an average salary near $125,000. Helsing calls it the company’s first U.S. “Resilience factory,” its term for the high-volume drone plants it is standing up on both sides of the Atlantic.
Production starts with the HX-2. Helsing is targeting initial operating capability by November, with full-rate production inside a year. Once it is running, the plant is designed to turn out more than 2,000 HX-2 drones every month, with room to scale further if orders climb.
“West Virginia stood out for its skilled workforce, speed to build, manufacturing heritage, and commitment to strengthening the U.S. industrial base,” said Jennifer McArdle, Helsing’s U.S. general manager.
State leaders framed it as a win. “Welcoming a global defense technology innovator with battlefield-deployed products like Helsing to Berkeley County is another major milestone,” said Gov. Patrick Morrisey.
The HX-2 Is Built For Attrition Warfare
The HX-2 is not a camera drone. It is an AI-enabled loitering munition, a roughly 26-pound (12 kg) X-wing aircraft that carries a warhead and flies about 62 miles (100 km) to its target. It can operate in GPS-denied conditions and uses onboard AI for terminal guidance, which means it can keep tracking a target even when jamming cuts the link back to its operator.
Helsing launched the HX-2 in December 2024 and has since sent thousands into Ukraine, where they are deployed along the front lines. Combat use is the whole pitch. The company is selling a weapon already tested in the hardest environment there is, then offering to build it by the thousand in the United States.
Price is the other half of the argument. A loitering munition that costs a fraction of the tank, radar, or command post it destroys rewrites the math of a battlefield, and that only works if you can build the drones in volume rather than in ones and twos. A plant sized for more than 2,000 units a month is the physical shape of that idea.
Why The U.S. Wants This Factory Now
The timing lines up with a hard push from the Department of War to close the drone gap with China and Russia.
In July 2025, then-Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a directive ordering the Pentagon to speed up drone production and deployment. He called small drones the biggest battlefield shift in decades and set a goal of U.S. “small UAS domain dominance” by the end of 2027, along with a plan to put expendable drones in the hands of every squad.
A foreign firm building strike drones in West Virginia fits that goal cleanly. It adds volume, it adds a combat-proven design, and it does both without waiting for a U.S. program to spin up from nothing.
DroneXL’s Take
I will say the quiet part out loud. It makes me sad, as someone who covers this field every day, that the fastest-growing corner of it is the one built for war.
I know the counterargument, that so much civilian technology traces back to military research, and it holds up. But I keep landing on one question: if the money pouring into military R&D went into civilian technology instead, what would we be building? We might have answers to problems that kill far more people than any front line ever will. Helsing on U.S. soil is smart business and smart policy. I just wish the sharpest minds of our time had a softer target.
Sources: Breaking Defense, Helsing newsroom, The Defense Post, Herald-Dispatch
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
