Saronic Starts Construction on $3 Billion Texas Shipyard

Saronic Technologies has broken ground on its planned $3 billion Port Alpha shipyard in Brownsville, moving one of the largest new U.S. shipbuilding projects in decades from the planning stage into construction.

Vice President JD Vance and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott joined Saronic executives Wednesday for the groundbreaking at the Port of Brownsville.

Saronic selected Brownsville for Port Alpha in July, outlining plans for a new shipyard capable of building both autonomous and crewed vessels for defense and commercial customers. The initial site covers 835 acres, with options that could eventually expand the footprint to nearly 4,400 acres. Operations are expected to begin in 2028.

The company says Port Alpha will open with about 150,000 gross tons of annual shipbuilding capacity, which it says would more than double current U.S. commercial shipbuilding capacity. The yard will initially be able to build vessels up to 850 feet long, with future expansion potentially supporting ships longer than 1,200 feet.

The first phase calls for 1.2 million square feet of enclosed production space spread across eight to 10 buildings, more than 2,500 feet of deepwater quay and two to four positions for final ship erection. Saronic is also planning annual steel-processing capacity of about 75,000 tonnes.

JE Dunn and Alberici have been selected as the joint-venture contractor for the initial construction phase.

“American shipbuilding needs to be rebuilt for what comes next,” Saronic co-founder and CEO Dino Mavrookas said. He said the facility is being designed around modular construction and higher production throughput for both autonomous and conventional ships.

Port Alpha is also moving ahead as Saronic’s Navy business expands rapidly.

The company plans to build U.S. Navy LCU 1700 landing craft at the Brownsville yard after being selected earlier this month alongside Conrad Shipyard and Master Boat Builders for prototype agreements covering the next generation of Navy landing craft. The three initial awards carried a combined obligation of roughly $280.5 million. gCaptain reported on the LCU awards earlier this month.

The groundbreaking also comes one day after Saronic disclosed that it had received a Navy production award for its 180-foot Marauder autonomous surface vessel under the service’s Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel Marketplace. Marauder completed more than 140 Navy test scenarios during eight days of continuous at-sea evaluation before receiving the production award.

Together, the programs are pushing Saronic beyond the smaller autonomous craft on which the Austin-based company built its early business and into large-vessel production and conventional naval shipbuilding.

Port Alpha is designed to accommodate that expansion.

Saronic and Texas officials estimate the project could eventually support as many as 10,000 direct jobs, including welders, machinists, naval architects, software engineers and robotics specialists. State officials put the project’s potential long-term economic impact in Texas at $264.5 billion, although details behind that projection were not provided in Wednesday’s announcements.

For Saronic, Wednesday’s groundbreaking turns what was announced just two months ago as an ambitious new shipyard into an active industrial project — and one that is increasingly tied to the Navy’s push to expand both conventional shipbuilding capacity and its future autonomous fleet.

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