Silicon Slopes: From Copper to Code

The economy that built Salt Lake City in the nineteenth century was extraction: silver and lead from the Wasatch canyons, copper from the Bingham pit, the labor of immigrants from a dozen countries working underground in conditions that were, by any contemporary standard, lethal. The economy reshaping the region in the twenty-first century runs on fiber and venture capital, and it has a marketing name: Silicon Slopes.

The term refers to the technology corridor that runs along the Wasatch Front from Salt Lake City south through Draper, Lehi, and Provo, taking advantage of the mountain backdrop that gives the region its name. Companies including Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, and dozens of local startups have established significant operations in the corridor. In the decade from roughly two thousand ten to twenty twenty, the region added tens of thousands of technology jobs, making Utah one of the faster-growing tech economies in the country.

What drives it is partly geography, partly culture, and partly economics. The cost of doing business in Utah is lower than in the Bay Area or Seattle. Supporters often credit LDS mission service with giving the workforce unusual foreign-language skills and international experience. The university pipeline from the University of Utah and Brigham Young University feeds technical talent into regional companies.

What it is building remains to be seen. The pioneers who arrived in eighteen forty-seven believed they were building a permanent civilization in an impossible landscape. The tech executives who occupy the glass towers along the Wasatch Front probably hold a similar conviction. The landscape is the same. The conviction that the desert can be made to sustain something large is a very old Utah idea.