IBM was founded June 16, 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York, and was renamed IBM in 1924. When IBM needed West Coast wartime manufacturing capacity, it built a plant in San Jose -- what the Center for Land Use Interpretation calls "one of the early computing seeds planted in Silicon Valley." In 1956, IBM's San Jose lab shipped the IBM 350, the first commercial hard disk drive. Rochester built the next foundational layer: Xerox, born there as the Haloid Company, funded the Palo Alto Research Center starting in 1970, where researchers built the Alto (the first GUI personal computer), Ethernet, and the laser printer -- technology Steve Jobs saw on a December 1979 visit that directly shaped the Macintosh. Seventy years after IBM's San Jose plant opened, the region that built both companies' founding factories is the site of the largest single manufacturing investment in New York State history: Micron broke ground in January 2026 on a $100 billion memory-chip megafab in Clay, NY, backed by $6.165 billion in federal CHIPS Act funding and $5.5 billion more from New York's Green CHIPS program, projected to create 50,000 jobs. GlobalFoundries' Fab 8 in Malta -- global headquarters, 3,000 employees, over $10 billion already invested -- is expanding on a $1.5 billion federal grant finalized in November 2024. Rochester's Institute of Optics, founded in 1929 by a joint Kodak and Bausch & Lomb grant, is the direct ancestor of AIM Photonics, the Department of Defense's $600 million photonics manufacturing institute. And Griffiss International Airport in Rome anchors one of just seven FAA-designated drone test sites in the country, running a 50-mile beyond-visual-line-of-sight corridor to Syracuse.