Follow
Santa Clara County, officially the County of Santa Clara, is the sixth-most populous county in the U.S. state of California, with a population of 1,936,259, as of the 2020 census. Santa Clara County and neighboring San Benito County together form the U.S. Census Bureau's San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara metropolitan statistical area, which is part of the larger San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland combined statistical area. Santa Clara is the most populous county in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Northern California. The county seat and largest city is San Jose; with about 1,000,000 residents, it is the 10th-most populous city in the United States, California's third-most populous city and the most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area. The second- and third-largest cities are Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.
Home to Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County is an economic center for high technology, and in 2015 had the third-highest gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the world (after Zürich, Switzerland and Oslo, Norway), according to the Brookings Institution. Located on the southern coast of San Francisco Bay, the urbanized Santa Clara Valley within Santa Clara County contains most of the county's population. More recently, extensive droughts in California, further complicated by drainage of the Anderson reservoir within the county for seismic repairs, have strained the county's water security.
The county's concentration of wealth, primarily due to the tech industry, has made it the most affluent county on the West Coast of the United States and the most affluent outside the Washington metropolitan area[10] and one of the most affluent places in the United States.
Santa Clara County is named for Mission Santa Clara de Asisi, which was established in 1777.