Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as 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
areas San Mateo County and Santa Clara County.[1][2][3] San Jose is Silicon
Valley's largest city, the third-largest in California, and the tenth-largest in
the United States; other major Silicon Valley cities include Sunnyvale, Santa
Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino.
The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the
world (after Zurich, Switzerland and Oslo, Norway), according to
the Brookings Institution,[4] and, as of June 2021, has the highest
percentage of homes valued at $1 million or more in the United States.[5]
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. 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.[6]
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.[7][8][9] More recently, intensifying droughts in
California have further strained the Silicon Valley region’s water security.[10]