Raytheon, one of the three principal business segments of RTX Corporation alongside Collins Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney, runs a Tucson campus that RTX says is home to the AMRAAM missile, the Tomahawk cruise missile and many other munitions, and where, in a 2026 article [not independently verified], it says it is investing in new factories and facilities with automation built in. In 2026 RTX named Tucson as a production site under Pentagon framework agreements announced in February and under a $745 million SM-3 Block IIA contract announced in August. RTX lists its principal executive offices at 1000 Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia, not in Arizona. RTX's 2025 annual report says the Raytheon business designs, develops and provides integrated air and missile defense, smart weapons, missiles, advanced sensors and radars, interceptors, space-based systems and hypersonics for use across land, air, sea and space. Customers named in its contract announcements include the U.S. Navy and the Missile Defense Agency. Across all of RTX, the company had approximately 180,000 employees worldwide at the end of 2025 and reported 2025 net sales of about $88.6 billion; the Raytheon segment alone had 2025 net sales of about $28.0 billion and a backlog of $75 billion at the end of 2025, up from $63 billion a year earlier. Public filings do not identify an Arizona-specific share of those figures, so Arizona AI does not attribute them to Tucson.
Raytheon is a defense manufacturer that designs and builds finished weapons systems, rather than a maker of chips or a builder of AI data centers. The verified facts show no chip design, chip fabrication, packaging or AI data-center work by Raytheon in Arizona. Its clearest AI link to the state is a test: RTX says its CADS radar warning receiver upgrade combines an embedded graphics processing unit with Deepwave Digital's computing stack so that AI models can run inside Raytheon's existing radar warning receivers for AI and machine learning processing at the sensor. The company says CADS performed successfully in flight testing on an F-16 at the Air National Guard's test range near Tucson in December 2024. That announcement came from Goleta, California [not independently verified], and it does not say the system was designed or built in Arizona. Raytheon says it is investing in new factories and facilities with automation built in throughout Tucson.
Raytheon's Arizona roots predate the Raytheon name in the state. In 1951 Hughes Aircraft established missile manufacturing operations in Tucson to build the Falcon air-to-air missile, according to a timeline the Arizona Daily Star attributes to Raytheon Missile Systems, and in 1952 the U.S. Air Force bought the Tucson operations and designated the site Air Force Plant 44. In 1993 Hughes leased additional space at the former IBM site on Rita Road, which later became the University of Arizona Science and Technology Park [not independently verified]. In 1995 the Tucson City Council made an annexation deal with Hughes Missile Systems to set aside undeveloped land tied to the Tucson Airport Authority as a buffer zone, and Raytheon bought Hughes in 1997. A 2016 update to that agreement routed some of the company's city taxes into a Raytheon Annexation Account used to buy the buffer land [not independently verified]. In November 2016 Raytheon announced a Tucson expansion; by May 2018 Raytheon said it was hiring 2,000 new employees for it, and the president of Raytheon Missile Systems said the company expected to invest more than $500 million, up from some $400 million when the expansion was announced [not independently verified]. The same 2018 report said the company had already hired most of those employees [not independently verified]. Arizona AI found no later figure for the amount actually spent; the record ends in May 2018. The expansion was in line for incentives that included at least $5 million from a state incentive fund, $6 million in city tax payments set aside for future Raytheon expansion, and $16 million in Pima County property tax breaks over a decade, as reported in 2018, if the company followed through; no record of the incentives actually paid was found. In January 2020 a Raytheon spokesman confirmed that Tucson would become headquarters of the new Raytheon Missiles and Defense business, created ahead of the merger with United Technologies [not independently verified].
That arrangement did not last in the same form. A February 2023 report described a plan to reorganize RTX's businesses into three units, Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney and Raytheon, in the second half of 2023, and the parent company, then Raytheon Technologies, unveiled the RTX name in June 2023. RTX's 2025 annual report confirms the three-segment structure. In July 2023 RTX announced a new Raytheon facility at SkySong, the Arizona State University Scottsdale Innovation Center, adding 28,000 square feet of digital design space and approximately 150 planned professional positions, with an opening scheduled for fall 2023. Arizona AI found no source after that July 2023 announcement confirming that SkySong opened as scheduled or how many people work there. Raytheon says it has a 49,000-square-foot Space Systems Operations facility in Tucson where teams develop, test and assemble parts for defensive interceptors, and it had significant operations at the University of Arizona Tech Park as of 2020 [not independently verified]. On August 18, 2026 the Tucson City Council approved transferring 212 acres south of Tucson International Airport from the city to the U.S. Air Force. KOLD reported the vote was 4-2 and that the land is planned for future Raytheon use although nothing is official, while Tucson Agenda reported that the city manager told the council he did not know what Raytheon would do with the land [not independently verified]. No later update after the August 2026 vote was found.
In 2026 RTX named Tucson as one of three production sites for expanded Pentagon missile programs. On February 4, 2026 RTX announced framework agreements with the Pentagon under which production will be completed at Raytheon facilities in Tucson; Huntsville, Alabama; and Andover, Massachusetts, and under which RTX plans to raise annual production to more than 1,000 Tomahawks, at least 1,900 AMRAAMs and more than 500 SM-6 interceptors. Those are targets for all three sites combined, and RTX does not give a Tucson-only rate; the contracts that followed are the latest status found. RTX then announced a Tomahawk contract worth $22.9 billion in August 2026, an AMRAAM contract valued up to $20.7 billion in September 2026 and an SM-6 contract valued up to $24.4 billion in October 2026; each figure is the value of the whole program contract, not Arizona spending. In August 2026 RTX also announced a $745 million Missile Defense Agency contract for SM-3 Block IIA interceptors and said production would be completed in Tucson and Huntsville. RTX says it is investing in Tomahawk production facilities in Tucson as part of $2.6 billion in worldwide capital expenditure in 2025, without giving the Tucson amount. Raytheon describes a dedicated 20,000-square-foot factory in Tucson for common guidance section production and a new large-scale automation factory where it says a testing machine will check missile parts 30% faster than manual methods; the undated article does not say whether the machine is now in use. The University of Arizona reports that Raytheon made a $2 million gift commitment in March 2025 for the College of Engineering's Student Design and Innovation Center; the payment schedule is not stated and no later update was found.
The record also includes legal and environmental problems. In October 2024 Raytheon Company agreed to pay over $950 million to resolve Justice Department investigations into a government fraud scheme involving defective pricing on certain government contracts and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; the Justice Department release does not name Tucson or Arizona. RTX's 2025 annual report says Raytheon Company and RTX operate under deferred prosecution agreements with an independent compliance monitor [not independently verified]. In July 2007 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered Raytheon and the U.S. Air Force to clean up a migrating plume of contaminated groundwater at the Tucson International Airport Area Superfund Site, treating trichloroethylene and 1,4-dioxane coming from the 1,365-acre Air Force Plant 44. The EPA said the plume was migrating toward a city of Tucson drinking water treatment plant serving about 50,000 residents [not independently verified]. Arizona AI could not verify the current status of that cleanup. Arizona headcount is also unsettled: a June 2025 article posted by the University of Arizona said Raytheon and RTX employ more than 12,500 people in Arizona, up from 11,000 a year earlier, while a 2026 Phoenix Business Journal manufacturers list, as described by Real Estate Daily News, put Raytheon at 15,000 employees in Arizona and ranked it the state's largest manufacturer by employee count. RTX's annual report gives no Arizona figure.
Taken together, the facts show a Tucson operation that began building missiles in 1951 at a site the Air Force bought in 1952 and designated Air Force Plant 44, and that RTX named in 2026 as a production site for Tomahawk, AMRAAM and SM-6 under Pentagon framework agreements and for an SM-3 Block IIA contract. How much of that work, money and hiring lands in Arizona is not stated in any source Arizona AI verified.