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 UGM-133A Trident II, or Trident D5 is a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), built by Lockheed Martin Space in Sunnyvale, California, and deployed with the United States Navy and Royal Navy. It was first deployed in March 1990, and remains in service. The Trident II Strategic Weapons System is an improved SLBM with greater accuracy, payload, and range than the earlier Trident C-4. It is a key element of the U.S. strategic nuclear triad and strengthens U.S. strategic deterrence. The Trident II is considered to be a durable sea-based system capable of engaging many targets. It has payload flexibility that can accommodate various treaty requirements, such as New START. The Trident II's increased payload allows nuclear deterrence to be accomplished with fewer submarines, and its high accuracy—approaching that of land-based missiles—enables it to be used as a first strike weapon.
Trident II missiles are carried by 14 US Ohio and 4 British Vanguard-class submarines, with 20 missiles on each Ohio class and 16 missiles on each Vanguard class (the number of missiles on Ohio-class submarines was reduced from 24 to 20 by 2017, in compliance with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). There have been 215 total test launches of the D5, with 207 successes. 196 launches were from the sea: 191 successes and 5 failures. 181 of the successes and 3 of the failures were by the US, while 10 of the successes and 2 of the failures were by the UK. 19 launches were from land, all by the US, with 16 successes and 3 failures. the most recent successful launch from USS Louisiana (SSBN-743) on 27 September 2023. There have been 8 test flights that were failures, the most recent being from HMS Vanguard off the coast of Florida in January 2024. The D5 is the sixth in a series of missile generations deployed since the sea-based deterrent program began 60 years ago. The Trident D5LE (life-extension) version will remain in service until 2042.
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.
Atari, Inc. was an American video game developer and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Atari was a key player in the formation of the video arcade and video game industry.
The company was founded in Sunnyvale, California, in the center of Silicon Valley, to develop arcade games, starting with Pong in 1972. As computer technology matured with low-cost integrated circuits, Atari ventured into the consumer market, first with dedicated home versions of Pong and other arcade successes around 1975, and into programmable consoles using game cartridges with the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS or later branded as the Atari 2600) in 1977. To bring the Atari VCS to market, Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications in 1976. In 1978, Warner brought in Ray Kassar to help run the company, but over the next few years, gave Kassar more of a leadership role in the company. Bushnell was fired in 1978, with Kassar named CEO in 1979.
Lockheed Martin Space is one of the four major business divisions of Lockheed Martin. It has its headquarters in Littleton, Colorado, with additional sites in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; Sunnyvale, California; Santa Cruz, California; Huntsville, Alabama; and elsewhere in the United States and United Kingdom. The division employs about 20,000 people, and its products include commercial and military satellites, space probes, missile defense systems, NASA's Orion spacecraft, and the Space Shuttle external tank.
The San Francisco Peninsula is a peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area that separates San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. On its northern tip is the City and County of San Francisco. Its southern base is Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos and Sunnyvale, in Santa Clara County. Most of the Peninsula is occupied by San Mateo County, which is between San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, and the Peninsula includes the cities and towns of Atherton, Belmont, Brisbane, Burlingame, Colma, Daly City, East Palo Alto, El Granada, Foster City, Half Moon Bay, Hillsborough, La Honda, Loma Mar, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Menlo Park, Millbrae, Mountain View, Pacifica, Palo Alto, Pescadero, Portola Valley, Redwood City, Redwood Shores, San Bruno, San Carlos, San Mateo, South San Francisco, Sunnyvale, West Menlo Park and Woodside.
Whereas the term peninsula in a geographical sense technically refers to the entire San Francisco Peninsula, in local jargon, "The Peninsula" does not include the city of San Francisco.
Santa Clara (/ˌsæntə ˈklærə/ SAN-tə KLAR-ə; Spanish for "Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in the Bay Area. Located in the southern Bay Area, the city was founded by the Spanish in 1777 with the establishment of Mission Santa Clara de Asís under the leadership of Junípero Serra.
Santa Clara is located in the center of Silicon Valley and is home to the headquarters of companies such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Nvidia. It is also home to Santa Clara University, the oldest private university in California, and Levi's Stadium, the home of the National Football League's San Francisco 49ers, and California's Great America Park. Santa Clara is bordered by San Jose on almost every side, except for Sunnyvale and Cupertino to the west.
Amazon Lab126 (sometimes known as Lab126) is an American research and development and computer hardware company owned by Amazon.com. It was founded in 2004 by Gregg Zehr, previously Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Palm, and is based in Sunnyvale, California. It is widely known for developing Amazon's Kindle line of e-readers and tablets.
Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one of the largest third-party video game publishers in the world and was the top United States publisher in 2016.
The company was founded as Activision, Inc. on October 1, 1979, in Sunnyvale, California, by former Atari, Inc. programmers for the popular Atari Video Computer System (later renamed to Atari 2600) home video game console. Upset at their treatment by Atari, they left to develop games for the same system. Activision was the first independent, third-party, console video game developer. The video game crash of 1983, in part created by too many new companies trying to follow in Activision's footsteps without the experience of Activision's founders, hurt Activision's position in console games and forced the company to diversify into games for home computers, including the acquisition of Infocom. After a management shift, with CEO Jim Levy replaced by Bruce Davis, the company renamed itself to Mediagenic and branched out into business software applications. Mediagenic quickly fell into debt, and the company was bought for around US$500,000 by Bobby Kotick and a small group of investors around 1991.