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Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley.[1][2][3] The term "Silicon Valley" refers to the area in which high-tech business has proliferated in Northern California, and it also serves as a general metonym for California's high-tech business sector.

This article is about the high-tech hub of the San Francisco Bay Area. For the geographical valley, see Santa Clara Valley. For other uses, see Silicon Valley (disambiguation).

The cities of Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Menlo Park are frequently cited as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. San Jose is Silicon Valley's largest city, the third-largest in California, and the 12th-most populous in the United States.[4] Other major Silicon Valley cities include Santa Clara, Redwood City and Cupertino. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world (after Zürich, Switzerland and Oslo, Norway), according to the Brookings Institution.[5] As of June 2021, it also had the highest percentage of homes valued at $1 million or more in the United States.[6]


Silicon Valley is home to many of the world's largest high-tech corporations, including the headquarters of more than 30 businesses in the Fortune 1000, and thousands of startup companies. Silicon Valley also accounts for one-third of all of the venture capital investment in the United States, which has helped it to become a leading hub and startup ecosystem for high-tech innovation, although the tech ecosystem has recently become more geographically dispersed.[7][8] It was in Silicon Valley that the silicon-based integrated circuit, the microprocessor, and the microcomputer, among other technologies, were developed. As of 2021, the region employed about a half million information technology workers.[9]


As more high-tech companies were established across San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, and then north towards the Bay Area's two other major cities, San Francisco and Oakland, the term "Silicon Valley" came to have two definitions: a narrower geographic one, referring to Santa Clara County and southeastern San Mateo County, and a metonymical definition referring to high-tech businesses in the entire Bay Area. The term Silicon Valley is often used as a synecdoche for the American high-technology economic sector. The name also became a global synonym for leading high-tech research and enterprises, and thus inspired similarly named locations, as well as research parks and technology centers with comparable structures all around the world. Many headquarters of tech companies in Silicon Valley have become hotspots for tourism.[10][11][12]

San Jose

Apple Worldwide Developers Conference

San Jose

Facebook F8

San Jose

Silicon Valley Comic Con

San Jose

Silicon Valley Pride

—1985 film from the James Bond series. Bond thwarts an elaborate ploy by the film's antagonist, Max Zorin, to destroy Silicon Valley.[128]

A View to a Kill

 – 1996 documentary

Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires

—1999 film about the early days of Apple Computer and Microsoft (though the latter has never been based in Silicon Valley)

Pirates of Silicon Valley

—2007 comedy series

Code Monkeys

—2010 film

The Social Network

—reality TV series, debuted 2012 on Bravo[129]

Startups Silicon Valley

—TV series, debuted 2013 on Amazon Video[130]

Betas

—2013 film

Jobs

—2013 comedy film about working at Google

The Internship

—2014 American sitcom from HBO

Silicon Valley

—2014 TV series, the last two seasons are primarily set in Silicon Valley

Halt and Catch Fire

—2015 film

Steve Jobs

—2016 video game developed by Ubisoft

Watch Dogs 2

—2019 docudrama about the 1990s tech boom in Silicon Valley

Valley of the Boom

—2020 TV miniseries

Devs

—2020 South Korean television series, when three artificial intelligence (A.I.) developers from South Korea are offered positions as engineers for the fictional company, 2STO which is located in Silicon Valley.

Start-Up

—2022 TV miniseries about the rise and fall of Theranos

The Dropout

—2022 TV series about Travis Kalanick's time at Uber

Super Pumped

Some appearances in media, in order by release date:

an element of corporate culture common among Silicon Valley organizations[131]

Fail fast (business)

List of tourist attractions in Silicon Valley

around the world

List of places with "Silicon" names

around the world

List of technology centers

Semiconductor industry

—A National Park Service website

Santa Clara County: California's Historic Silicon Valley

—An American Experience documentary broadcast in 2013

Silicon Valley

at the Wayback Machine (archived December 20, 2007) from San Jose State University

Silicon Valley Cultures Project

Silicon Valley Historical Association

Silicon Valley Central Chamber of Commerce website