Italy's share of the next-generation fighter now has an address. On Friday, 9 October 2026, Edgewing, the joint company designing the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) fighter for Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom, cut the ribbon on Edgewing Italia in Turin, the programme's first national site outside its British headquarters.

It is a building, not a prototype, and that is exactly the point. GCAP is the most ambitious European-led combat aircraft effort since the Typhoon, and Turin has just been chosen as the place where hundreds of Italian, Japanese and British engineers will sit side by side to draw it. Bienvenue to the drawing office of 2035.

A trinational drawing office, opened in Italy

Edgewing is the trinational prime contractor that leads the design and development of the GCAP aircraft. It is owned in equal thirds by BAE Systems, Leonardo and JAIEC, is chaired by Herman Claesen and run by chief executive Marco Zoff, and has its headquarters in Reading, England, where the GCAP Agency and Edgewing set up shop in 2025.

Edgewing Italia is the company's first national entity and its operational presence in Italy. Leonardo says that, at full capacity, around 1,000 people will work there, with more than 1,000 additional Leonardo employees working on GCAP partner-company activities, mostly in Turin and at nearby Caselle. Sites in Japan and the UK are due to follow in the coming months.

Why Turin? Because Piedmont already builds fighters. Caselle, just north of the city, is where Leonardo carries out final assembly of the Eurofighter Typhoon for Italy, while the company's aeronautical engineering is concentrated in Turin itself. Leonardo employs about 5,200 people in Piedmont, roughly 2,200 of them at Caselle and nearly 1,800 in Turin, and says its regional ecosystem supports more than 14,500 direct, indirect and induced jobs.

That ecosystem also reaches deep into small business. Leonardo counts about 420 Piedmont-based suppliers, 87% of them small and medium-sized enterprises, which received orders worth roughly €740 million in 2025. Other Italian industrial partners in GCAP include Avio Aero, Elettronica and MBDA Italia.

From £686 million to £4.6 billion

GCAP was launched in 2022, when Britain's Tempest effort and Japan's F-X programme merged into a single fighter for three nations, with Italy joining as a full partner. The governments manage it through the GCAP International Government Organisation (GIGO) and its executive arm, the GCAP Agency.

The money has been arriving fast this year. An initial joint contract worth £686 million was signed in April 2026, and on 3 July the GCAP Agency awarded Edgewing a second contract worth £4.6 billion. Jointly funded by the three countries, it runs for 18 months and is meant to complete the advanced analysis and concept phase before detailed design begins. Leonardo puts the international contracts Edgewing has signed with the agency this year at more than €6 billion.

The aircraft itself is only the centre of the system. Leonardo describes GCAP as a hub-and-spoke architecture spanning air, land, sea, space and cyber, with the crewed fighter at its core and command, control and communications underpinned by artificial intelligence and supercomputing. Edgewing will hold design authority for the whole product lifecycle, which Leonardo says extends beyond 2070, while national industries and their supply chains handle production and final assembly.

Why this matters beyond Piedmont

Europe currently has two rival sixth-generation fighter efforts: GCAP, and the Franco-German-Spanish FCAS. While FCAS partners have repeatedly clashed over work share, GCAP keeps converting paper into contracts, money and now office space. Reports earlier this month that Germany is exploring a role in GCAP show how much that momentum is being noticed.

For Italy, the Turin site is also an industrial insurance policy. A design office staffed by engineers from all three nations, sitting next to the line that already assembles Italy's Typhoons, makes it far harder for Rome to end up as a mere subcontractor on the jet that will replace them.

The first GCAP fighter is still roughly a decade from squadron service. But as of this week, the people who will design it have somewhere new to park their cars, and it is in Turin.

Sources: Leonardo, Edgewing, Defence Industry Europe, MILMAG