Santa Clara, California in the context of Sun Microsystems

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. 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.

The cities of Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Menlo Park are frequently cited as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. Other major Silicon Valley cities are San Jose, Santa Clara, Redwood City and Cupertino. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world (after Zurich and Oslo), according to the Brookings Institution. As of June 2021, it also had the highest percentage of homes valued at $1 million or more in the United States.

San Benito County (/ˌsæn bəˈniːtoʊ/ ; San Benito, Spanish for "St. Benedict"), officially the County of San Benito, is a county located in the Central Coast region of California. Situated in the California Coast Ranges, the county had a population of 64,209, as of the 2020 United States census. The county seat is the city of Hollister.

San Benito County is included in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is also included in the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area. El Camino Real passes through the county and includes one mission in San Juan Bautista.

Frank Marion Wanlass (May 17, 1933, in Thatcher, AZ – September 9, 2010, in Santa Clara, California) was an American electrical engineer. He is best known for inventing, along with Chih-Tang Sah, CMOS (complementary MOS) logic in 1963. CMOS has since become the standard semiconductor device fabrication process for MOSFETs (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors).

Intel Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It designs, manufactures, and sells computer components such as central processing units (CPUs) and related products for business and consumer markets. Intel was the world's third-largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue in 2024 and has been included in the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue since 2007. It was one of the first companies listed on Nasdaq. Since 2025, the United States government has held a 9.9% non-voting equity stake in the company.

Intel supplies microprocessors for most manufacturers of computer systems, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). It also manufactures chipsets, network interface controllers, flash memory, graphics processing units (GPUs), and other devices related to communications and computing. Intel has a strong presence in the high-performance general-purpose and gaming PC market with its Intel Core line of CPUs, whose high-end models are among the fastest consumer CPUs, as well as its Intel Arc series of GPUs.

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by its current executive chairman Larry Ellison, Oracle is among the 20 largest companies in the world by market cap, and ranked 66th on the Forbes Global 2000 as of 2025.

The company sells database software (particularly the Oracle Database), and cloud computing software and hardware. Oracle's core application software is a suite of enterprise software products, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise performance management (EPM), Customer Experience Commerce (CX Commerce) and supply chain management (SCM) software.

Sunnyvale (/ˈsʌniveɪl/) is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States.

Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the north, Moffett Federal Airfield and NASA Ames Research Center to the northwest, Mountain View to the northwest, Los Altos to the southwest, Cupertino to the south, and Santa Clara to the east.

The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is currently held at Apple Park in California. The event is used to showcase new software and technologies in the macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS families as well as other Apple software; new hardware products are sometimes announced as well. WWDC is also an event hosted for third-party software developers that work on apps for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other Apple devices. Attendees can participate in hands-on labs with Apple engineers and attend in-depth sessions covering a wide variety of topics.

The first WWDC was held in 1983, with the introduction of Apple Basic, but it was not until 2002 that Apple started using the conference as a major launchpad for new products. Beginning in 1987, WWDC was held in Santa Clara. After 15 years in nearby San Jose, the conference moved to San Francisco, where it eventually became Apple's primary media event of the year and regularly sold out. WWDC returned to San Jose 13 years later.

The San Francisco 49ers (also written as the San Francisco Forty-Niners and nicknamed the Niners) are a professional American football team based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The 49ers compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the National Football Conference (NFC) West division. The team plays its home games at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, located 38 miles (61 km) southeast of San Francisco. The team is named after the prospectors of the California gold rush.

The team was founded in 1946 as a charter member of the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and joined the NFL in 1949 when the leagues merged. The 49ers were the first major professional sports team based in San Francisco. They are the 10th-oldest franchise in the NFL, and have been owned and operated by Italian Americans (Morabito and DeBartolo families) since their inception. The team played at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco before moving to Candlestick Park in 1971 and then to Levi's Stadium in 2014. Since 1988, the 49ers have been headquartered in Santa Clara.

Frost & Sullivan is an American business consulting firm. It offers market research and analysis, growth strategy consulting, and corporate training. It has about 45 offices in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe; the principal office is in Santa Clara, California.

Nvidia Corporation (/ɛnˈvɪdiə/ en-VID-ee-ə) is an American technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, it develops graphics processing units (GPUs), systems on chips (SoCs), and application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science, high-performance computing, and mobile and automotive applications. Nvidia has been described as a Big Tech company.

Originally focused on GPUs for video gaming, Nvidia broadened their use into other markets, including artificial intelligence (AI), professional visualization, and supercomputing. The company's product lines include GeForce GPUs for gaming and creative workloads, and professional GPUs for edge computing, scientific research, and industrial applications. As of the first quarter of 2025, Nvidia held a 92% share of the discrete desktop and laptop GPU market.

National Semiconductor Corporation was an American semiconductor manufacturer, which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions. National's key markets included wireless handsets, displays and a variety of broad electronics markets, including medical, automotive, industrial and test and measurement applications.

On September 23, 2011, the company formally became part of Texas Instruments as the "Silicon Valley" division.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with significant operations in Austin, Texas. It develops central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), system-on-chips (SoCs), and high-performance computer components. AMD serves a wide range of business and consumer markets, including gaming, data centers, artificial intelligence (AI), and embedded systems.

AMD's main products include microprocessors, chipsets for motherboards, embedded processors, and graphics processors for servers, workstations, personal computers (PCs), and embedded system applications. The company has also expanded into new markets, such as data centers, gaming, and high-performance computing. AMD's processors are used in a wide range of computing devices, including PCs, servers, laptops, and gaming consoles. Initially manufacturing its own processors, the company outsourced its manufacturing after GlobalFoundries was spun off in 2009. Through its Xilinx acquisition in 2022, AMD offers field-programmable gate array (FPGA) products.

The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located in Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the main campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As of Fall 2024, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,940 undergraduate and 1,998 graduate students. Satellite facilities in other Santa Cruz locations include the Coastal Science Campus and the Westside Research Park and the Silicon Valley Center in Santa Clara, along with administrative control of the Lick Observatory near San Jose in the Diablo Range and the Keck Observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Founded in 1965, UC Santa Cruz is a collegiate university, using a residential college system consisting of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge university system.