The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act passed the U.S. Senate on June 8, and that bill provides billions in funding for chip and robot makers, an overhaul of the National Science Foundation, and funding for scientific research.

Included in the bill is an earmark for national labs to help bolster technology – and that $17 billion earmark could bring billions to New Mexico, says Sen. Ben Ray Lujan.

“New Mexico’s National labs are pioneers in fields ranging from climate change to quantum computing. I’m proud to have fought for an amendment that invests $17 billion in our national labs to bolster innovation and create good-paying jobs,” Lujan wrote in a June 7 Tweet with a link to an Albuquerque Journal article discussing the bill.

The bill includes a total of $52 billion for the production of semiconductors, and that could mean big things for New Mexico. The Los Alamos National Laboratory moved hundreds of people to a new campus in Santa Fe as part of the lab’s making space on the Los Alamos National Lab property for future workers who are charged with building plutonium cores – the lab has a deadline to begin producing a minimum of 30 cores a year, starting in 2026, and this move was in preparation for that.

Lujan worked on two amendments in the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. The first amendment was $17 billion to be invested in facilities and national labs, and the second creates the Foundation for Energy Security and Innovation, an organization to “advance collaboration with energy researchers, institutions of higher education, industry, and nonprofit and philanthropic organizations to accelerate the commercializations of energy technology,” according to a report by Yahoo Finance dated June 7.

CNBC reported  that the bill is the final product of half a dozen Senate committees and "almost all members of the chamber."