8. Guadalajara, Mexico
Guadalajara, Mexico is often compared with the US tech hub San Francisco. One of Mexico’s biggest cities Guadalajara is the centre of the country’s IT industry and recently the government approved a program to build the so-called Mexican Silicon Valley in the city.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Access deeper industry intelligence
Experience unmatched clarity with a single platform that combines unique data, AI, and human expertise.
Around $120m has been invested in nearly 300 Guadalajara start-ups since 2014.
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.
With as many as 80,000 manufacturing jobs and roughly 25,000 engineers working in Guadalajara, the tech future rests in foreign firm recruitment and local start-ups gaining name exposure.
However, doing business in Mexico comes with risk.
From 2007 to 2014, the drug war took 164,000 lives nationwide, more than all the civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq during that time, while forty mayors have been slain in eight years.
