Is Mexico the next Silicon Valley? Tech boom takes root in Guadalajara.
Wearing shaggy beards, wire-rimmed glasses and T-shirts with silk-screened start-up logos, they look like your average 20-something coders. The young men huddle in the midday sun, smoking cigarettes, sipping coffee out of paper cups, scrolling through iPhones.
Behind them sits a bustling co-working space with 850 tech workers and dozens of start-ups building apps, tweaking online experiences, pumping out design. The vibe feels much like Silicon Valley. But they’re nowhere near Northern California. They’re hundreds of miles south, in Guadalajara, Mexico’s “Digital Creative City,” the capital of the state of Jalisco, where government subsidies and affordable talent attract foreign tech giants.
Many places claim to be the next Silicon something. New York as Silicon Alley, Los Angeles as Silicon Beach. None faces the same south-of-the-border scrutiny. Yet, there is a burgeoning scene in these agave-lined hills.
Around $120 million has been invested in nearly 300 Guadalajara start-ups since 2014, much of it coming from venture capital in the United States. With several thousand start-ups and blue-chip giants, too, Jalisco annually exports $21 billion in tech products and services, according to the state’s innovation ministry. Multinationals such as IBM, Oracle, Intel, HP, Dell and Gameloft have satellite offices. Jalisco has 12 universities, including the prestigious Tecnológico de Monterrey, creating an IT funnel of 85,000 graduates a year.
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