Santa Clara County, California
Santa Clara County, also commonly referred to as the South Bay, is a subregion of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is the largest county in Northern California and the sixth-most populous county in California, with 1,936,259 residents as of the 2020 census. The county seat and largest city, with a population of 997,368, is San Jose.
The U.S. Census Bureau groups Santa Clara County and neighboring San Benito County into the San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara metropolitan statistical area, which has a population of 2,000,468 people. This MSA is included in the broader San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland combined statistical area.
Containing significant portions of Silicon Valley, the South Bay is an economic center for high technology, and had the third-highest gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the world as of 2015 behind Zürich and Oslo, according to the Brookings Institution. Located on the southern coast of San Francisco Bay, the urbanized southern portion of Santa Clara Valley between the Santa Cruz Mountains and Diablo Range contains most of the county's population.
As of 2020, Santa Clara County had a median household income of $130,890, the third-highest household income of any county in the nation behind Loudoun County, Virginia and Falls Church, Virginia, and the highest of any county in the Western United States.