[2] Tech Valley grew to encompass 19 counties straddling both sides of the Adirondack Northway and the New York Thruway,[1] and with heavy state taxpayer subsidy, has experienced significant growth in the computer hardware side of the high-technology industry, with great strides in the nanotechnology sector, digital electronics design, and water- and electricity-dependent integrated microchip circuit manufacturing,[3] involving companies including IBM in Armonk and its Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, GlobalFoundries in Malta, and others.

[9] The name "Tech Valley", or "Techneurial Valley" as was originally used, is usually credited to Wallace "Wally" Altes, a former president of the Albany-Colonie Regional Chamber of Commerce ("the Chamber"),[10] while the shortened name from "Techneurial" to "Tech" was the idea of Jay Burgess.

The 19 counties were Albany, Clinton, Columbia, Dutchess, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Greene, Hamilton, Herkimer, Montgomery, Orange, Rensselaer, Saratoga, Schenectady, Schoharie, Ulster, Warren, and Washington.

[15] Also in 1998, Rupprecht & Patashnick put "Made in New York's Tech Valley" stickers on all its air quality sensors for the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) national monitoring network.

Years before that the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's RPI Tech Park had been visited by semiconductor companies, but they had chosen not to build.

[24] As time progressed opposition grew in response to concerns about potential impacts on traffic and the environment.

[28] It would be there that GlobalFoundries, a spin-off of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), decided to build a $4.2 billion chip fab, ground breaking was in July 2009.

The deciding factor on picking Tech Valley was the $5 billion College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute and the resulting "high-tech ecosystem" put in place during Governor George Pataki's administration.

[30] Subsequently, in April 2021, GlobalFoundries, a company specializing in the semiconductor industry, moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley, California to its most advanced semiconductor-chip manufacturing facility in Malta, Saratoga County, New York.