Manufacturing Engineer

Hadrian opens new Navy submarine facility in the shoals. The 2.2 million-square-foot site will produce components for two classes of submarines March 23, 2026 California-based Hadrian has opened a new facility in Cherokee, in Colbert County, that will boost production of U.S. Navy nuclear submarines. Hadrian is investing $1.5 billion and the Navy is investing $900 million to repurpose the former FreightCar America plant to make submarine components. The 2.2 million-square-foot plant will be highly automated to make components for Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. According to Hadrian, these products have been identified as the largest drivers of submarine schedules, so increasing production will allow submarines to be produced faster. The plant is expected to provide up to 1,000 manufacturing jobs, according to the U.S. Navy. "This is a novel transaction with Hadrian - providing the Department of the Navy downside protection and upside participation," said U.S. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan. "More than $1.5 billion in capital from Hadrian comes in first. The Department of the Navy follows with a commitment of $900 million to scale up the factory, grounded in demonstrated performance and ensuring we are investing in outcomes, not promises. Risk is shared. Performance in required. The Department of the Navy has a stake in the outcome. And American taxpayers will benefit from our success." The Factory 4 project is estimated to take 18-24 months from initiation to full-rate production. - Sponsor - The Cherokee facility is the first large-scale inland advanced manufacturing facility dedicated to the U.S. maritime industrial base. Hadrian has four facilities totaling approximately 2.85 million square feet across California, Arizona and Alabama, and is developing additional production sites covering the full suite of production, from components to complete products and assemblies. "We call this distributed shipbuilding, and it's a key tenet of our plan to achieve required shipbuilding production rates," said Jason Potter, performing the duties of assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition. "These factories of the future might be several states away from the yards where the ships are ultimately built, but by taking on this work, they reduce bottlenecks, having a profound effect on the speed of delivery." The Virginia-class and Columbia-class submarines are built in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Virginia. The plant in the Barton Riverside Industrial Park has seen many occupants from its original owners, the railcar company National Alabama through Navistar and FreightCar America. AE Industrial Partners purchased the property in January 2026 saying it expected an aerospace tenant.

Hadrian has opened a $2.4 billion advanced manufacturing facility in Cherokee, Alabama, dedicated to producing components for the US Navy's Columbia- and Virginia-class submarine programmes. The public-private partnership combines over $1.5 billion in private capital with $900 million in government funding. Known as Factory 4, the 2.2 million-square-foot facility will mass-produce submarine parts and assemblies identified as major bottlenecks in submarine production schedules. The site is expected to reach full-rate production capacity within 24 months and create up to 1,000 jobs when fully operational. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan and several senators and representatives attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Hadrian's manufacturing platform, Opus, is designed to bring technicians to full productivity within 30 days through automation, addressing critical labour shortages in the maritime industrial base.

Navy bets $900M on automated factories to boost submarine production. Hadrian's Factory 4 submarine-part plant in Cherokee, Alabama, on the morning of its ribbon-cutting ceremony, March 20, 2026. Garrett Lindsey Stay Connected Find opportunities - and win them. March 23, 2026 Four-year-old Hadrian wins contract as service seeks to offset worker shortages. The Navy is betting $900 million that highly automated factories can help it add submarines in an era when skilled workers are scarce. The contract will support "non-recurring engineering across three facilities" to be built by Hadrian, a four-year-old advanced manufacturing company. "This is not just another factory," Navy Secretary John Phelan said in his prepared remarks for a Friday ribbon-cutting ceremony for Hadrian's Factory 4 near Muscle Shoals, Ala. "This is a different model. Hadrian does not just machine parts. They build integrated production systems: raw material in, test-ready hardware out. A single system doing what used to require dozens of suppliers. Their platform allows these facilities to run continuously." Since 2018, the Navy has poured roughly $9.8 billion into the submarine industrial base, including funding used at private supplier firms for facility upgrades and workforce expansion, the Congressional Research Service wrote earlier this year. The new $900 million contract, funded by last year's reconciliation bill, aims to boost production of hard-to-make parts and components using a mix of robotics and automation. "The number-one problem that the Navy's identified is we can't find enough skilled workers, so we have to automate our way out of this problem," Hadrian CEO Chris Power told reporters. Dubbed Factory 4, the 46-acre facility and its up-to-1,000 employees are slated to produce components and systems for Columbia- and Virginia-class submarines before expanding to other maritime programs. The factory will run on Hadrian's Opus software, which the company's website calls "the full stack, AI-powered platform for Factory Autonomy." Power said it will be tuned to meet the exacting requirements of the Navy's Submarine Safety Program, or SUBSAFE. Automation and robotics will be used for welding, machining, fabrication, assembly, inspections, and tests. The goal is to automate 80 percent of the work and have processes simple enough to train workers in as little as 30 days. Factory 4 is part of Hadrian's $2.4 billion plan to build a total of three facilities to support Navy programs. Company officials said plans for the other two facilities, which are to focus on castings and forgings and other critical materials, will be announced in coming months. Toward a bigger fleet Shipbuilding has become a top priority for the White House, whose "Golden Fleet" plan calls for a larger Navy with a new frigate and a new "battleship." On Tuesday, the Navy's first "submarine-production czar" described his fundamental conundrum. "We are not at our required construction cadence, and that's the challenge ahead of me as I take on this role as [direct reporting portfolio manager for] submarines. So ultimately, as I look across the yard, I see that we have a math problem," Vice Adm. Robert Gaucher said at the McAleese defense programs conference. For example, it takes about 13 million hours to build a basic Virginia-class submarine and 18 million for one with payloads. A Columbia-class submarine takes 34 million hours to make. "If you add it all up, that's about 70 million hours that we need to generate to get to that two-plus-one case," Gaucher said, using the shorthand for buying two attack subs and a missile boat per year. He said there are three levers to fix submarine production: growing the workforce, increasing productivity, and improving the delivery of parts and components just before they're needed. Over the past year, the Navy has tried to do things differently, canceling struggling programs like the frigate and pushing the use of AI in shipyards to improve scheduling and supply-chain management. But workforce challenges persist even as major military shipbuilders boast increased hiring and wages. The Navy "can't hire enough people and the primes can't hire enough people because there aren't enough trained people to do it...We need to automate and have people running multiple robots in a new way of doing things versus replacing jobs," Power said. "It's about making the factory itself five to 10 times more productive, and also making that manufacturing more accessible, so that [the workforce] can be trained in 30 to 40 days," while keeping human workers in the loop. Shipbuilders already use robotics and automation, but Hadrian's approach aims to employ the technologies from the beginning, rather than added on to to a traditionally manual manufacturing process. Power said robotics and automation will enable its factories to handle unexpected orders. "You need these factories hot and ready to go, and you can't necessarily plan everything," he said. "Opus enables [us] to have that capacity idle in capital equipment and robotics, and not have to, say, hire or fire people." The factory is expected to reach full production capacity in two years with plans to deliver materials in the next year, Power said.