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Palmer Luckey might have found his next area of focus: laptops.
Luckey rose to prominence with the founding of Oculus in 2012. He sold the virtual reality company to Facebook in 2014, and after he was reportedly fired in 2017, he co-founded a military tech firm called Anduril Industries that has primarily focused on the development of autonomous systems. (Including surveillance tools as well as both aerial and underwater vehicles.)
Anduril was followed by the announcement of a cryptocurrency-focused bank called Erebor earlier this month. (Luckey and several of Anduril's co-founders, who also previously worked at Palantir Technologies, are unabashed in their obsession with "Lord of the Rings." )But it seems Luckey might not be content with mil-tech and crypto.
Would you buy a Made In America computer from Anduril for 20% more than Chinese-manufactured options from Apple?July 20, 2025
Luckey previously asked the same question at the Reindustrialize Summit, a conference whose website said it was devoted to "convening the brightest and most motivated minds at the intersection of technology and manufacturing," which shared a clip of Luckey discussing the subject, wherein he talks about the extensive research he has already done around building a PC in the U.S.:
Here's the moment where @PalmerLuckey interrupted @ashleevance at Reindustrialize to ask:"How many people in the audience would buy an American made computer if it was 20% more expensive?"The full clip is a great distillation of his thinking on the opportunity. https://t.co/aEvFdAxyBx pic.twitter.com/77qsvBJ52dJuly 20, 2025
Luckey wouldn't be the first to make a laptop in the U.S. (PCMag collected a list of domestic PCs, including laptops, in 2021.) But those products use components sourced from elsewhere; they're assembled in the U.S. rather than manufactured there. That distinction matters, according to the Made in USA Standard published by the Federal Trade Commission. To quote:
"For a product to be called Made in USA, or claimed to be of domestic origin without qualifications or limits on the claim, the product must be 'all or virtually all' made in the U.S. [which] means that the final assembly or processing of the product occurs in the United States, all significant processing that goes into the product occurs in the United States, and all or virtually all ingredients or components of the product are made and sourced in the United States. That is, the product should contain no — or negligible — foreign content."
So it would be interesting to see if Anduril could produce a laptop that meets the FTC's standards, though it seems unlikely that sourcing exclusively American-made components would result in a mere 20% price bump, especially if performance is competitive with the recent MacBook models to which Luckey is comparing the company's hypothetical wares.
How much more would you be willing to pay for a laptop that was truly made in America? Let us know in the comments.
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