On a crisp morning in January 1848, James W. Marshall James W. Marshall spotted a glittering stone beneath his feet along the banks of the American River, where he was constructing a lumber mill east of Sacramento. Biting into the soft metal flint, Marshall changed the course of California—and America—forever.
The Gold Rush sparked an ecosystem of entrepreneurs that sprang up across frontier California and Nevada. Nearly 100,000 Forty-Niners descended upon the Sierra Nevada foothills, creating instant demand for supplies, services, and food.
Sixty miles to the south of San Francisco, the Santa Clara Valley (more generally known today as Silicon Valley) became a crucial piece of the Gold Rush economy. It fed San Francisco’s hungry prospectors with agricultural goods while supplying mercury from the New Almaden mine, essential for extracting gold from mineral impurities with any sort of efficiency. The mine became the world’s second-largest mercury producer, eventually yielding $2.37 billion worth of quicksilver in today’s dollars—more valuable than any California gold mine.
Today, coders and AI researchers have replaced mercury miners in this epicenter of innovation, developing artificial intelligence, quantum computing, clean tech, and next-generation mobility.
The Heart of the AI Revolution
Like its quicksilver deposits, innovation runs through Santa Clara County and its largest city, San Jose. The 1920s and ’30s saw the prodigiously fertile region shipping fruits and canned goods internationally. The 1940s brought the digital era with pioneering computing firms. The Space Race of the 1950s and ’60s ushered in generations of aerospace innovation—from commercial and military aircraft to spacecraft from every crewed flight program.
This pattern of innovation continues today. “San Jose has always thrived by reinventing itself as the frontier of innovation,” says San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. “I remember the cusp of the dot-com boom—you could feel the energy as the skyline transformed and companies with world-changing ambitions put down roots here. I feel that same energy today.” The startups that were putting down roots in the late 90s are now mature industry incumbents drawing upon the area’s dense constellation of universities, research institutions, and competitors to fuel the next era of transformation—the AI boom.