An industrial stretch of Santa Clara

Cheap power and fiber turned this corridor into a data hub

You're standing on Laurelwood Road in Santa Clara, surrounded by office parks and tech campuses. This ground sits in what county records simply list under a Santa Clara parcel, without a named building attached to it.

Intel built its world headquarters nearby, and its Intel Museum has told the story of the microchip since 1992. From 2016 until 2022, a nonprofit called Hacker Dojo gave programmers and tinkerers a place to build things together nearby, before it closed for good.

Three quarters of a mile off, the old settlement of Agnew's Village, California once stood, named for a Santa Clara Valley pioneer, Abram Agnew, who donated land for a rail depot in the 1870s.

Silicon Valley Power runs the Donald Von Raesfeld Power Plant nearby. It opened in 2005 near San Jose International Airport, burning natural gas to make electricity for the grid.

The plant pairs two gas turbines with a steam turbine, squeezing extra power from their leftover heat. A major substation stands close by, feeding the dense web of fiber lines that cross through Santa Clara.

Cheap power and heavy internet capacity turned this stretch of the city into one of the most important data center hubs in the country. Companies have packed the area bounded by Highway 101, Lafayette Street, and San Tomas Expressway with server farms ever since.

Further along, other newer companies have taken root. Minerva Surgical (United States), founded in 2008, and Shape Memory Medical (United States), founded in 2009, both develop medical devices nearby. The National Laboratory for Education Transformation, an education research group, set up in 2011.

None of these stand on the parcel itself. They sit scattered across the surrounding blocks, part of the same corridor of offices, labs, and server rooms that now covers ground once farmed by families like the Agnews.