Santa Clara County, officially the County of Santa Clara, is California's 6th most populous county, with a population of 1,781,642, as of the 2010 census. Santa Clara County and neighboring San Benito County together form the U.S. Census Bureau's San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is a component of the larger San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA 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, the 10th most populous city in the United States, California's 3rd most populous city and the most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Home to Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County is an economic center for high technology and has the third highest GDP per capita in the world (after Zurich, Switzerland and Oslo, Norway), according to the Brookings Institution. 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 and one of the most affluent places in the United States.Located on the southern coast of San Francisco Bay, the urbanized Santa Clara Valley within Santa Clara County contains most of its population.