Autonomous vessel developer Saronic has broken ground on Port Alpha, a purpose-built shipyard at the Port of Brownsville, Texas.
Backed by more than $3bn in private investment, the facility is intended to substantially expand US naval and commercial shipbuilding capacity.
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Spanning 835 acres with room to grow to nearly 4,400 acres, Port Alpha has been designed from scratch to produce autonomous, autonomy-capable and manned ships at scale.
When operations begin, the facility will offer an initial 150,000 gross tons of annual shipbuilding capacity, which Saronic says would more than double current US commercial shipbuilding capacity.
Longer term, the yard could scale to over two million gross tons and accommodate vessels exceeding 1,200 feet in length, potentially making it the largest shipyard in the country.
The project responds to several federal defence priorities, including the Administration’s Executive Order on restoring US maritime dominance, the Maritime Action Plan, and the US Navy’s strategy for a hybrid fleet of crewed and uncrewed platforms.
US Vice President JD Vance and Texas Governor Greg Abbott were among dignitaries who attended the groundbreaking ceremony.
Saronic co-founder and CEO Dino Mavrookas said: “Port Alpha is designed from the ground up to produce both autonomous and manned vessels at scale, with modularity and throughput shaping the shipyard’s architecture.
“This is one of the defining engineering challenges of our time, and we are building the team, partnerships, and capital base to meet it.”
The yard’s first production programme will be Landing Craft Utility (LCU) vessels for the US Navy. Saronic secured the LCU contract last month under a firm fixed-price Other Transaction Authority agreement.
LCUs are amphibious logistics craft with a 170-ton payload capacity and a range of roughly 1,200 nautical miles, enabling them to ferry troops, vehicles and cargo from offshore ships to beaches or unimproved shorelines.
This capability is central to amphibious operations, resupply and disaster-response missions.
The initial construction phase encompasses 1.2 million ft2 of enclosed production space within a 2.5-million- ft2 production activity area, more than 2,500ft of deepwater quay, and 75,000 tonnes of annual steel processing capacity.
Port Alpha is also intended to supplement existing US shipbuilders and support allied nations facing similar capacity constraints.
Over the coming decade, Saronic expects Port Alpha to create up to 10,000 direct jobs across skilled trades, robotics, software engineering and naval architecture.
The company is collaborating with Texas state authorities and regional educational institutions on training and apprenticeship pathways, seeking to help address a projected national shortfall of approximately 250,000 skilled shipbuilding workers.
