NSF Is Offering $10–50 Million Per Year to Research Teams That Think Beyond Papers

A typical NSF grant runs $200,000 to $500,000 over three years. The new Tech Labs initiative is offering $10 million to $50 million per year, for at least four years, to teams that can turn fundamental research into commercially viable technology.

That's not a typo.

NSF's Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) — the newest directorate, created in 2022 to bridge the gap between lab discoveries and market impact — is making its boldest move yet. Tech Labs represents a fundamentally different bet on how federal research funding can work: fewer grants, much bigger checks, and explicit expectations that the work leads somewhere beyond a journal publication.

How Tech Labs Works

The structure breaks from NSF convention in several ways. First, the selection is competitive and phased. NSF will pick 2-4 teams per topic area for an initial 9-month "formation phase," during which teams demonstrate their technical approach, build partnerships, and develop execution plans. Then 1-2 teams per topic advance to full multi-year execution.

The focus areas read like a national technology priority list: quantum technology, artificial intelligence, critical materials, semiconductor manufacturing, and biotechnology. These aren't randomly chosen — they map directly to the CHIPS and Science Act's key technology focus areas and the administration's critical and emerging technology list.

Second, and this is the part that should get your attention: the awards are structured as Other Transaction (OT) agreements, not standard NSF grants. OT agreements originated in defense procurement and give funded teams significantly more operational flexibility. Reduced reporting burdens, fewer compliance requirements, and more freedom to structure teams, partnerships, and intellectual property arrangements.

The tradeoff is that NSF expects something traditional grants don't demand: commercialization milestones. Teams must go "beyond traditional research outputs" and demonstrate a credible path from discovery to deployment. Publications are fine, but they're not the point.

Who Should Be Paying Attention

The explicit target is "independent research organizations" — a deliberate signal that NSF wants applications from beyond the usual university suspects. That includes:

Nonprofit research institutes like Battelle, SRI International, and the dozens of smaller independent labs scattered across the country. These organizations already operate at the intersection of research and technology transition, and the OT contract structure fits their operating models better than traditional grants.

University spinouts and affiliated research centers that operate with more autonomy than a typical academic department. Think of organizations like MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Caltech's JPL, or the applied research centers that many state universities have built to serve industry partners.

Small research companies with deep technical capabilities and existing federal relationships. Companies that have outgrown SBIR but haven't reached the scale to compete for major DOD contracts could find Tech Labs to be the right middle ground.

Consortia. Nothing in the program structure prevents multi-organization teams, and given the scale of the awards ($10-50M per year), NSF likely expects teams that bring together complementary capabilities across institutions.

If your organization does research that has clear technology transition potential but you've struggled to fund the "valley of death" between lab demonstration and commercial viability, this program is designed for you.

The Strategic Context

Tech Labs doesn't exist in a vacuum. NSF created the TIP directorate in response to a bipartisan consensus that America's research-to-commercialization pipeline is broken. The U.S. leads the world in basic research but consistently struggles to translate discoveries into domestic manufacturing, products, and jobs. China's state-directed technology transfer system, whatever its other flaws, moves faster from lab to market.

The CHIPS and Science Act authorized NSF to experiment with new funding models. Tech Labs is the most dramatic experiment yet — taking the DARPA model of large, milestone-driven awards and applying it to NSF's broader research mission.

It's also worth noting the budget context. NSF received $8.75 billion in FY2026 — a 3.4% cut from FY2024, but vastly more than the 57% reduction the White House originally proposed. Congress clearly wants NSF to do more with what it has. Concentrating significant resources on a small number of high-impact teams, rather than spreading thin across thousands of modest grants, is one way to do that.

How to Position for the Solicitation

The RFI closed January 20, and NSF is expected to release the formal solicitation in spring 2026 with selections in the first half of the year. That timeline is aggressive, which means teams should be assembling now.

Build your team around the transition, not just the research. NSF has signaled repeatedly that Tech Labs is about technology deployment. If your team is all PhD researchers with no commercialization experience, add partners who know how to move technology to market — business development leads, manufacturing engineers, industry advisors with procurement relationships.

Pick a focus area where you have genuine depth. The topic areas — quantum, AI, critical materials, semiconductors, biotech — are broad, but NSF will fund specific technical approaches within each. A focused proposal that demonstrates deep capability in a narrowly defined problem will outperform a broad proposal that tries to cover an entire field.

Understand what OT means for your organization. Other Transaction agreements operate under different rules than standard grants. There's no FAR compliance requirement, IP terms are negotiable, and cost-sharing arrangements are more flexible. If your organization has only operated under traditional grant terms, talk to a contracts attorney who has worked with DOD OTs before preparing your proposal.

Study the RFI responses. While individual responses aren't public, NSF often signals its priorities through the questions it asks and the community day presentations that follow. Watch for any pre-solicitation webinars or industry days announced on the TIP directorate's website.

The window between solicitation release and proposal deadline will likely be tight. Teams that start building partnerships, drafting technical narratives, and identifying their commercialization angle now will have a significant advantage over those who wait for the formal announcement.

For organizations tracking large-scale federal opportunities across agencies, Granted surfaces funding like Tech Labs alongside the thousands of smaller grants that keep research programs running between the big bets.