The Research Pipeline is Stalling

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) froze all outgoing funding, including new awards and scheduled payments on active grants. Over 1,000 NSF research projects were abruptly canceled in a few days, resulting in roughly $739 million in halted research funding. The directive, issued with little explanation, has created chaos across the academic research ecosystem, part of a broader trend that Nature recently described as an unprecedented assault on science itself.

The ramifications are profound. Laboratories have been forced to suspend operations. Graduate students face uncertainty about completing their degrees. Early-career faculty have lost their first major grants, sometimes just months after starting their jobs and labs. Departments are freezing hiring, deferring PhD admissions, and scrambling to keep core infrastructure afloat. The entire academic research enterprise is stalling, not because the ideas aren’t there, but because the support has vanished. What was once America’s steady innovation engine is now sputtering under the weight of policy and silence.

Meanwhile, where are those who benefited from America’s higher education? The tech giants whose founders and engineers were trained in these institutions, whose core technologies were incubated in these research environments? Universities are left to defend The Promise of American Higher Education alone. There’s no contingency plan for this disruption, no industry emergency fund to save labs, and no guidance on preserving student funding. Every department, PI, and institution is improvising, trying to patch over a pipeline cracking at every joint—a pipeline that sent talent streaming into industry coffers for decades.

This is what system designers recognize as a pipeline stall. The inputs (funding and institutional support) are blocked. The outputs (trained students, published research, working prototypes) are starving for resources, creating a growing bubble of dependency hazards. The pipeline stages that move ideas forward (labs, advisors, infrastructure) are frozen, and values cannot be forwarded to the next stage. And just like in any system, when the stall isn’t resolved quickly, latency builds, dependencies break, and failure propagates backward through the entire execution path.

This blog is a call to action. It asks our community of researchers, educators, and—especially—our industry leaders and alumni who have directly benefited from higher education to stand in solidarity with the system that built us. It asks the industry (as a holistic entity), in particular, to move beyond silent support and take visible, vocal responsibility for the research pipeline on which it depends.

The academic pipeline is stalling, and it will take all of us, especially those who have reaped its rewards, to step up as stewards of science and defend the academic foundations that made their success possible.

A Legacy We All Recognize

We don’t need to remind the SIGARCH community of our shared history. Every member of this community knows that our field’s landmark innovations emerged not purely from product roadmaps but from university labs with federal funding. You know these stories. You lived them, or you studied under those who did.

The story of systems innovation is inseparable from public research. RISC, out-of-order execution, speculative prefetching, vector processing, GPGPU, and multicore—all of these breakthroughs took shape in university labs, powered by federal support. These weren’t incremental product features. They were conceptual leaps, sometimes radical, requiring time, freedom, and student talent to explore. And these breakthroughs didn’t stay in the lab. They reshaped entire industries. Public investment has powered innovation through three enduring pathways:

Academic Tools That Became Global Infrastructure. RISC-V, now a worldwide open standard, began as a research project at UC Berkeley. The gem5 simulator, essential for computer architecture research, emerged from NSF-supported efforts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Michigan. It continues receiving federal support as it evolves to meet the research community’s needs. LLVM, the compiler framework now embedded in everything from iOS to data centers, was launched and developed at the University of Illinois with federal funding support.

Research Projects That Became Industry Giants. Google began as an NSF-funded Digital Library project at Stanford. Akamai spun out of federally funded MIT research on internet traffic, helping to build the content delivery layer of the modern web. Qualcomm’s early wireless breakthroughs were rooted in federal funding, thanks to faculty at UCSD and UCLA. Siri traces its origins to federally funded work in cognitive assistants. Each of these examples shows how public research has seeded technologies that became transformative companies.

Benchmarks That Became Standards. SPEC and MLPerf, which define fairness and accountability in systems evaluation, were shaped by collaborations among academics, national labs, and industry. SPEC benefited from early academic input and support from labs like LLNL. MLPerf was developed through a broad partnership spanning Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Harvard, alongside national labs and leading industry partners. Federal funding helped support the graduate students and principal investigators who worked across these sectors.

These are just a few examples, but they’re not outliers. They are the natural result of sustained public investment in ideas, people, and infrastructure. When we fund basic research, we don’t just advance knowledge; instead, we lay the groundwork for industries, train the talent that leads them, and shape the technologies that define our future.

Industry’s Quiet Debt to Academic Research

Amidst the growing chaos, the silence from industry is deafening. The tech sector often presents its breakthroughs as the product of internal innovation, as if they emerged fully formed from corporate labs. But as we’ve seen, many of today’s most transformative advances were first conceived, developed, and refined in publicly funded university research, long before they were commercialized by companies that now profit from them.

Moreover, the engineers and researchers who lead research innovation and infrastructure development at places such as Google, Meta, NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple were trained in publicly funded universities. The architects of MapReduce, TensorFlow, CUDA, and countless other industry-defining systems started in academic labs backed by NSF and DARPA grants. They learned their craft in spaces free from quarterly earnings pressure.

Yet, the returns on that public investment have been wildly asymmetric. A few million in research gifts are scattered across universities. Some branded fellowships support a handful of Ph.D. students, while many more are needed to sustain the scale of these programs. Occasionally, nonprofit consortia offer additional support. All of this is valued, but it pales compared to the industry salaries, stock options, and profit margins built on this foundation.

Meanwhile, academia continues to carry the burden: training the next generation, maintaining open infrastructure, and stewarding community benchmarks and standards—all while industry captures the lion’s share of the financial reward. This isn’t just an imbalance; it’s an existential threat to the very pipeline that sustains the industry’s future.

At a moment when the research ecosystem that built today’s tech giants is under unprecedented strain, the absence of their collective voice speaks volumes. Industry must step up to support and defend the public pipeline. Otherwise, it risks starving the very source of its future:

• • You don’t get applied research without basic research.
  • You don’t get a talent pool without a talent pipeline.
  • You don’t get scale without exploration.

Many of you, our deeply respected colleagues, collaborators, and friends in industry, understand this. However, at this moment, mere understanding isn’t enough. We need you to speak up, show up, and take action. What is one thing you’re willing to do? Say it, do it, and let it count. And make no mistake: the need for action is urgent.

The Talent Pipeline Under Threat

Nowhere is action more urgently needed than protecting the talent pipeline, which is the foundation of our shared success. The pipeline that brought so many of us into this field is no longer just at risk; it’s beginning to collapse. Every chip, compiler, and system we’ve built has a lineage that runs through undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs.

The fallout is already here. Schools are pausing PhD admissions and are unsure if they can support students. Some offers are being rescinded. The prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship saw its awards cut in half this year. Undergraduate REU programs, which are a critical entry point into research for many budding scientists since they support their first exposure to research, have dropped from ~200 to just over 50 funded sites. Postdocs are being let go. One PI described the situation as “being in a war—you’re just trying to survive.”

Meanwhile, 65 NSF CAREER grants were canceled, a blow that will deeply affect early-career faculty. Computer architecture is particularly vulnerable. Research in this field depends on costly infrastructure—simulators, chip tape-outs, and FPGAs. Without stable funding, labs shrink or shutter. The students who might have built the next great system won’t be trained. Unlike cloud infrastructure, academic infrastructure doesn’t scale back up overnight.

International talent, long a cornerstone of the U.S. research engine, is also at risk. As the academic pathway grows more unstable and funding dries up, many may hesitate to come—or to stay. A growing number of scientists are now considering leaving. Europe is actively positioning itself as a haven for embattled U.S. researchers, with calls for a “solidarity and attractivity boom” to welcome brilliant minds facing “ill-motivated and brutal funding cuts.” The result could be a devastating brain drain that would impoverish American innovation and diminish science.

Perhaps the most concerning aspect of this is that it isn’t just a slow-moving crisis; it’s happening now. If we don’t act, the next generation of systems talent may never enter the field.

What We Can Do Now: ACT

We know the systems community takes pride in solving hard problems. This is one of them. If you care about the future of innovation, education, and research, here’s a to-do:

Advocate with The People’s Pledge for Higher Education: Make your voice part of something larger. Help build visibility, solidarity, and public pressure. This collective signal will help demonstrate to policymakers that research, education, and innovation are values we’re willing to defend. It gives them the moral support they need to fight the battles. Sign the pledge.

Call on industry to contribute: Ask your colleagues and friends in industry to step up. Those who have benefited should now stand to uphold. If you’re in the industry, ask your company to acknowledge its public reliance on the academic research pipeline. Encourage leadership to issue a statement, provide bridge funding for canceled research, or directly support students and labs. Urge them to engage with policymakers. Industry has influence—help it use that power responsibly. Make that call.

Talk beyond the echo chamber: If you’re in the U.S., contact your senator. No matter where you are, start a conversation with someone outside our usual circles: a colleague in industry, a former student, or a friend in product development. If each of us brings just one new voice into the conversation, we multiply our impact. Let your voice be heard.

Here’s an example of putting these principles into action: Not everything has to be grand. My wife and I recently hosted a backyard BBQ for people in Boston—just good home-cooked food and an open invitation to folks from industry, academia, and the broader community. Over 100 people showed up, not for an agenda, but because they care about higher education. We simply made space for conversation, connection, and reflection on what’s happening to education, why it matters, and what we can each do. The discussions that started that day are still unfolding, already leading to real actions. Sometimes, the most meaningful action begins with shared meals (because we all love food), honest dialogue, and the courage to come together.

Pick one. Reach one person. Do it today.

Conclusion

I’ve been surprised by how many people, from industry leaders to scientific citizens, are afraid to speak up. They cite fears of professional or social consequences. I understand that fear. But silence, especially now, is a form of complicity. And that silence reveals a troubling reality: in a field built on boldness and innovation, we have become hesitant to defend the very system that enables our work.

We live in a time that demands courage, the courage to speak up when others stay silent, to rise when others remain seated, and to build bridges between academia and industry rather than watch the gap grow wider. That courage is not something we must summon alone. As a community, we can find it together. We are responsible for protecting the ecosystem that enabled our success and ensuring it thrives for the next generation. For those in senior positions, that means using your influence, whether leading a research lab, directing an engineering team, or shaping corporate strategy, to keep our field’s intellectual infrastructure strong and vibrant.

As Nature editorialized in February 2025, “an assault on science and scientists anywhere is an assault on science and scientists everywhere.” The Royal Society similarly warned that cutting science for ideological reasons threatens not only national progress but the global fabric of evidence-based innovation. Science is collaborative by nature; when it’s weakened in one part of the world, the consequences ripple outward.

The time has come to be stewards of science—to stand up for what we believe in and what’s essential, even when it’s hard. Not to sit back and watch the pipeline stall, or let the system that built us quietly break. Our collective future in computing depends not just on what we invent, but on our willingness to defend the conditions that make invention possible. Find your purpose to summon the courage. Find your purpose to summon the courage. I am doing this to protect the opportunities that shaped my path, for my kids and for yours. A.C.T now.

About the Author

Vijay Janapa Reddi is a Professor at Harvard University, where he works at the intersection of computer architecture, machine learning systems, and autonomous agents. He is a longtime advocate for equitable access to education and innovation. He is the author of the open-source Machine Learning Systems textbook and creator of the TinyML edX course series, which has reached over 100,000 students. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

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Disclaimer: These posts are written by individual contributors to share their thoughts on the Computer Architecture Today blog for the benefit of the community. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal, belong solely to the blog author and do not represent those of ACM SIGARCH or its parent organization, ACM.