Capital Region Ranks among the Top Areas for Advanced Defense R&D Awards
Highlights
- DARPA awards to Capital Region firms totaled $29.6 million over last five years.
- FY2025 DARPA awards in Capital Region up 293.4% from previous year.
- NY-20 ranks 26th in U.S. and 6th in Northeast for DARPA awards over last five years.
The Capital Region is one of the top places in New York and the Northeast for the nation’s most advanced defense-oriented research and development, according to a Center for Economic Growth (CEG) analysis of contracts awarded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) awards.
Capital Region Performance
Over the last five years (fiscal years 2021-2025), DARPA awarded $29.6 million for R&D performed by prime or sub contractors in the eight-county Capital Region.1 In fiscal year 2025 alone, Capital Region DARPA awards totaled $7.7 million. When taking inflation into account (in chained 2017 dollars), the region’s FY2025 DARPA award total was its most in four years and three times the amount awarded in fiscal years 2023 and 2024.
CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT PERFORMANCE
Those Capital Region DARPA awards went to firms in New York’s 20th congressional district (NY-20). Among the 168 congressional districts nationwide with firms that received DARPA awards during the five-year period, NY-20 ranked 26th for the most funding for advanced defense R&D. NY-20 also ranked sixth among Northeast congressional districts and first among those in New York.
Among the state’s 10 economic development regions, the Capital Region had the second greatest amount of DARPA awards, trailing on the New York City region at $56.3 million. The five-county New York City region contains 13 congressional districts.
PRIME AWARDS
Nearly two-thirds of the DARPA awards in the Capital Region (59.4 percent) stemmed from prime contracts and grants, under which local firms are the lead research agents. Local prime DARPA awards during the five-year period included:
GE Vernova ($14.3 million): Atmospheric water extraction.
General Electric ($7.5 million): High enthalpy aperture technology (HEAT).
Kitware ($4.6 million): AI-assisted perceptually enabled task guidance (PTG).
GE Vernova ($3.3 million): Liquid mirrors for ground and space systems.
General Electric ($2.6 million): Morphogenic interfaces (MINT).
Kitware ($1.3 million): Artificial intelligence quantified (AIQ).
SUBAWARDS
The remaining $12 million in DARPA awards went to local sub-contractors, who supported lead (prime) contractors. Examples of local DARPA subawards included:
SRI International-SUNY Research Foundation ($1.4 million): Growth, fabrication and material characterization of gallium nitride-based quantum-well structures
BAE Systems-General Electric ($652,300): High operational temperature sensors (HOTS)
Physical Science-M&P Lab ($196,145): Designing and fabricating high-temperature crucibles, along with melting moon dirt to produce solid test samples (coupons), and supporting material modeling and component testing.
Northrop Grumman-General Electric ($16,096): Miniature Integrated Thermal Management Systems for 3D Heterogeneous Integration (MINITHERMS3D).
Kitware-University at Albany ($338,675): Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program for the detection, attribution, and characterization of falsified or manipulated multi-modal media (e.g., deepfakes).
University of Illinois-Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ($404,993): Influence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking for geopolitical influence campaign tracking.
Raytheon-Crystal IS ($31,680): High-performance, advanced materials (HAM) substrates for Ultra-Wide BandGap Semiconductors (UWBGS) program.
Other R&D projects involving Capital Region tech companies as subcontractors include IBM Research in DARPA’s Thermal Design of Nanoscale Transistor (Thermonat) program and GlobalFoundries in the agency’s DARPA’s Next-Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing (NGMM) program based at the University of Texas, Austin.
NOTES
1 DARPA award total is the sum of new prime awards and subawards during fiscal years 2021 and 2025, minus any intraregional subawards from prime contracts in the region. Dara from USAspending.gov.
CEG Initiatives
CEG has a long history of supporting the Capital Region’s semiconductor industry, from marketing the region and hosting events at SEMICON West to sponsoring several apprenticeship programs for GlobalFoundries and NY Creates to conducting a microelectronics workforce needs assessment for the Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub (NORDTECH). CEG has also launched a Semiconductor Growth Access Program (SGAP) that aims to broaden the Capital Region’s semiconductor supply chain by providing targeted businesses with funding for legal, financial, business planning, and technical accounting assistance.
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