Is this for people who already have an MS, so 6 total?

No. It's basically allocating funding for 250 PhD seats across a couple top engineering programs (CMU, UCSD, UIUC, Columbia SEAS, Penn SEAS, etc) with the expectation that said research would be linked with an industrial partner (eg. HPE, Bayer, Nvidia)

Edit: I just reread your comment. I think it is for students who are already doing their MS or have previously done so and are applying to PhD programs

	▲	smelendez 39 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Probably also for students with “just” a bachelor’s. Most PhD students don’t enter with a master’s. I do wonder if NSF is hoping to seed more industry-sponsored PhDs as well, e.g., the first will be funded by NSF to establish the program, and industry will fund more once the program gets going. Definitely makes sense to me they call it a PhD, not a master’s. A PhD is more prestigious and signals the holder is ready and eager to do cutting-edge research and has some experience doing so. There are all kinds of master’s degrees (I say as someone who has one) and reasons for getting them, so they’re not as strong a signal of anything in particular. And they can mean someone switched careers, someone dropped out of a PhD program, someone took advanced classes during undergrad, someone got a bachelor’s in one country and wanted to study and work in another, etc.
	▲	nxobject an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Re: Bayer - the non-health industry side? I'm surprised NIH hasn't rolled out something like this earlier, to be honest, with their increasing emphasis on commercialisation.
	▲	lokar an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Huh, odd. I could see trying to get back to everyone normally finishing in 6. But 4 seems really short.