It's more a matter of what have they done for us lately. We had a number of supercomputing centers in the 90's (at least one has shuttered), and among other things NCSA brought most people their first telnet client and their first web browser via NSF funding that Al Gore pushed for (see also: Al Gore invented the Internet)

After that they were working with INRIA on collaboration software fifteen years before WebEx was a thing. They also had large divisions looking at VR and data visualization.

Oh, and also Apache web server was a fork of NCSA's httpd.

HDF too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_Data_Format

Intel has MKL/TBB/IPP/etc which are now under one umbrella: https://software.intel.com/en-us/performance-libraries

This is largely done by private companies in the US. In the past, ATT Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were shining examples. Today, every major technology company has labs and other internal organizations contributing research to new technologies: Netflix, Google, Microsoft, etc.