You could easily drive through the leafy Silicon Valley suburb without realizing you were in the US’ richest neighborhood. From the road, it is all high brick walls and opaque gates.
It takes Google Maps to get a glimpse of what lies behind. Satellite images of Atherton, California — where the average household income just blew past US$500,000 — reveal the sprawling homes of tech billionaires and sports stars, studded with tennis courts and pools.
For the fourth straight year, Atherton topped Bloomberg’s Richest Places annual index. With an average household income of more than US$525,000, it became the first and so far only community to top the half-million-dollar mark since Bloomberg started compiling the index in 2017.
Photo: Bloomberg
At least some of the town’s Silicon Valley neighbors are more or less keeping up. Atherton is joined in the upper echelons of the Bloomberg list by Hillsborough (No. 3) and Los Altos Hills (No. 5), two more communities in the hi-tech corridor between San Francisco and San Jose.
Both have average incomes upward of US$400,000.
Elaine White, a real-estate agent and native of neighboring Redwood City, has watched the tech boom shape the region.
“Because of how big Facebook has gotten, and Google, we’ve kind of become this concept of the company town, where so many people work for these Silicon Valley companies,” she said.
In Atherton, the cheapest house on the market was listed for US$2.5 million, according to real-estate marketplace Zillow.com.
Numerous tech billionaires have called the town home — including former Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt, Facebook Inc chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Microsoft Corp late cofounder Paul Allen, whose former residence there was last week sold for more than US$35 million.
Golden State Warriors athlete Stephen Curry last year bought an Atherton estate for US$31 million.
In second place for the second straight year was Scarsdale, New York, less than 40km outside Manhattan, with an average US$452,000 in annual household income.
Also making the top 10 were a town near Denver, Colorado, two northern suburbs of Chicago and a wealthy enclave in Dallas, Texas.
In general, the east and west coasts dominated the top 100 list. California took up 23 places, while the tri-state area of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey accounted for 32, although that was down from 36 last year.
Middle America is slowly gaining some ground. States including Illinois and Minnesota added one new listing in this year’s index, while Texas gained two (Lucas at No. 73 and Alamo Heights at No. 75).
Altogether, 16 states are represented on the list, the same number as in previous years — suggesting that the concentration of wealth in certain regions remains largely unchanged over time.
Also, the richest communities continue to get richer. This year, to make the top 100, a neighborhood needed an average household income of US$220,000, up from US$209,000 last year.
Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Monday introduced the company’s latest supercomputer platform, featuring six new chips made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), saying that it is now “in full production.” “If Vera Rubin is going to be in time for this year, it must be in production by now, and so, today I can tell you that Vera Rubin is in full production,” Huang said during his keynote speech at CES in Las Vegas. The rollout of six concurrent chips for Vera Rubin — the company’s next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) computing platform — marks a strategic
REVENUE PERFORMANCE: Cloud and network products, and electronic components saw strong increases, while smart consumer electronics and computing products fell Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday posted 26.51 percent quarterly growth in revenue for last quarter to NT$2.6 trillion (US$82.44 billion), the strongest on record for the period and above expectations, but the company forecast a slight revenue dip this quarter due to seasonal factors. On an annual basis, revenue last quarter grew 22.07 percent, the company said. Analysts on average estimated about NT$2.4 trillion increase. Hon Hai, which assembles servers for Nvidia Corp and iPhones for Apple Inc, is expanding its capacity in the US, adding artificial intelligence (AI) server production in Wisconsin and Texas, where it operates established campuses. This
Garment maker Makalot Industrial Co (聚陽) yesterday reported lower-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue of NT$7.93 billion (US$251.44 million), down 9.48 percent from NT$8.76 billion a year earlier. On a quarterly basis, revenue fell 10.83 percent from NT$8.89 billion, company data showed. The figure was also lower than market expectations of NT$8.05 billion, according to data compiled by Yuanta Securities Investment and Consulting Co (元大投顧), which had projected NT$8.22 billion. Makalot’s revenue this quarter would likely increase by a mid-teens percentage as the industry is entering its high season, Yuanta said. Overall, Makalot’s revenue last year totaled NT$34.43 billion, down 3.08 percent from its record NT$35.52
OPPORTUNITY: Supply of conventional DRAM chips tightened after the world’s major memory makers focused on manufacturing chips utilized in AI servers DRAM chipmaker Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday reported a spike in revenue for last month, as severe supply constraints prompted chip price hikes, almost doubling the company’s annual revenue last year from the previous year. Revenue soared 444.87 percent last month to NT$12.02 billion (US$381.4 million), from NT$2.21 billion a year earlier. That brought fourth-quarter revenue to NT$30.17 billion, from NT$6.58 billion for the same period in 2024. On a quarterly basis, revenue jumped 60.65 percent from NT$18.78 billion. Last year, revenue soared 95.09 percent to NT$66.59 billion from NT$32.13 billion in 2024, the company said. Supply of conventional DRAM
RSS