Where in the world?

The big boys

You might think that the head offices of all the big companies in the tech industry would be in a close vicinity but, surprisingly, that just isn't the case.

NVIDIA is based in Santa Clara, CA in the heart of Silicon Valley, along with plenty of other tech firms like Oracle and, of course, Intel. The big blue has a large head office just down the road from NNVIDIA, and it's a wonder that their proximity didn't bring about nForce 4 for Intel a lot quicker! AMD is based not too far away, in Sunnyvale, CA - but far enough away to avoid any Intel spies no doubt.

ATI, on the other hand, eschewed the perpetual West Coast sunshine for... Toronto, Canada. Whilst it does have a chip design centre in the ubiquitous California, the base of the Red Team's operations is in snowy Ontario. Maybe the low temperatures, which dip as low as minus 10 celcius in Winter, enable them to overcock their chips just a little bit further?


Microsoft are way off-base in Seattle, which is swiftly become a large tech centre. Nintendo owns offices just across the road from MS, and the two were recently entangled in a land-battle to see who could get their property development plans approved first, with Microsoft eventually being forced to scale back plans for new offices to Nintendo's benefit.

Microsoft's big rival, Apple, is based back in California, in Cupertino, close to founder Steve Jobs' other main interest – Pixar, the animation studio. Pixar is just the other side of the gorgeous San Francisco bay. Apple has a rather cool road name - 1 Infinite Loop.

Michael Dell grew up in Austin, Texas - so it's no surprise to find out that the headquarters of the biggest PC seller in the world is in the same area. Dell HQ is in Round Rock, Texas. However, Dell's helpdesk consists of two locations. One is in Twin Falls, Idaho. The other is on the other side of the world - in Manila, the Phillipines. Apparently, the Fillipino accent is considered to be closer to American than an India accent.

Alienware is often considered to be duking it out with VoodooPC for the title of the best high-end system maker. However, we know which has the best location - Alienware is based in sunny Miami, Florida, presumably meaning that staff can take a break from overclocking PCs to go and check out the awesome action on South Beach. VoodooPC is based in the rather less glamourous Calgary, Canada.


Meanwhile, back in the UK, two of the biggest system builders here are based not much more than a stone's throw from each other. In the gorgeous Cathedral city of Warwick we find the über-notebook manufacturers Rock Direct, whos central England warehouse speedily dispatches notebooks to the corners of the country. It may not surprise you to find out that Evesham Technology, who make rather spiffy desktops and notebooks, are based in Evesham, between Worcester and Oxford.