Thousands of Silicon Valley employees have been laid off over the past year, often finding out the bad news by email. Hit hard by rampant inflation and over-hiring during the Covid pandemic, the US tech giants of the San Francisco Bay Area have faced one of the worst crises in their history. A few months ago, a banking crisis added to their woes, when Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt, before being rescued by the federal government at the last minute. Nevertheless, the tech sector – renowned for its resilience – is refusing to give in to defeatism, as our team reports.
Silicon Valley is synonymous around the world with innovation and new technology. In just a few decades, the area surrounding the San Francisco Bay in Northern California has become home to a unique ecosystem of start-ups and tech giants valued at billions of dollars. It all started at Stanford University, where young engineers, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, were encouraged by their professors to innovate and launch their own companies. HP would be the first of many: Apple, Google, Cisco, Intel and Meta were all founded in Silicon Valley.
