New Mexico runs on two national laboratories most of the country only half-remembers exist: Los Alamos, where the first nuclear weapons were designed and where Triad National Security now holds the management contract, and Sandia in Albuquerque, run by Honeywell's NTESS since the contract moved off Lockheed Martin in 2017. Descartes Labs, a satellite-imagery and geospatial-AI company headquartered in Santa Fe, was founded by scientists who left Los Alamos to build it -- the exact same lab-to-company pattern that built San Antonio's cyber cluster and Tampa's CENTCOM-adjacent defense firms, playing out here around physics instead of signals.
Region Stats
Total firms
53
VC / investors
1
Companies
47
Schools
5
Known For
The Bomb
The Labs It Left
What Spun Out
