Fuse opens Albuquerque lab

A chip can work perfectly in a lab and still fail in orbit, because space throws charged particles at electronics the way hail hits a windshield. The fix is radiation testing: you expose parts to controlled doses on Earth and see what breaks before the satellite or missile ever launches. (nasa.gov, nasa.gov) Fuse said on April 10, 2026 that it opened a new radiation-effects testing facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and expects it to begin serving customers by summer 2026. The company said Fuse Federal bought several acres of land and plans to invest tens of millions of dollars in the site. (prnewswire.com) The bottleneck here is not designing chips. The bottleneck is getting enough access to specialized beams, labs, and engineers to prove a device can survive radiation without flipping bits, degrading, or shutting down. (prnewswire.com, sandia.gov) Sandia National Laboratories describes radiation-hardened microelectronics as essential for space, high-altitude, and defense systems that face harsh radiation environments. In plain English, these are the chips that have to keep working when ordinary electronics would glitch or die. (sandia.gov) Albuquerque is not a random pin on the map. Sandia’s main facilities are there, Kirtland Air Force Base hosts advanced space and test organizations there, and the city already has semiconductor and defense work clustered around it. (sandia.gov, kirtland.af.mil, nist.gov) The Air Force Research Laboratory also broke ground in Albuquerque in 2022 on a radiation-tolerance lab called Facility for Radiation Tolerance Research on Electronics for Space and Strategic Systems. That tells you the local demand is big enough that both government and private players are adding capacity in the same city. (afrl.af.mil) Fuse is not coming in cold. In February 2026, the company said a Fuse Federal subsidiary had been selected for the Missile Defense Agency’s SHIELD indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity program and tied that win directly to its radiation-testing capabilities. (prnewswire.com) That matters because a missile-warning satellite, a hardened communications payload, and a space-grade power chip all hit the same wall at the same point: they cannot move from promising hardware to deployable hardware until the radiation data exists. A domestic lab cuts shipping, scheduling, and queue time out of that path. (prnewswire.com, nasa.gov) The semiconductor angle is easy to miss, but it is real. The National Institute of Standards and Technology says Rocket Lab’s Albuquerque operation makes radiation-resistant space-grade solar cells for U.S. space programs, so the city already sits inside a supply chain where radiation tolerance is a product requirement, not a nice-to-have. (nist.gov) Fuse said the new site will create dozens of engineering and technical jobs over the next few years. If the lab opens on its summer 2026 schedule, Albuquerque gets one more piece of infrastructure that turns the city from a place that designs national-security hardware into a place that can qualify it fast enough to ship. (prnewswire.com)