Silicon Valley Tbilisi
New high tech centre opens in Georgia

Georgia is embracing its growing role as a technology nation by developing a platform for local developers, software engineers and entrepreneurs to bring life to their bright business ideas.

Next month a new technological centre named Silicon Valley Tbilisi will open its doors on Chavchavadze Ave, in a central district of capital Tbilisi.

The large facility will be a learning place for children and tertiary students and will also be home to satellite offices of several of the world’s leading technology firms.

Silicon Valley Tbilisi will include an Information Technology (IT) Academy, Business and Technology University, a school, laboratory and research centres and a technological incubator.

There will also be student campuses, a summer school for children with outdoor play areas and swimming pools.

Staff trained and educated [at Silicon Valley Tbilisi] will be in demand and successful not only in Georgian businesses but in the international area as well,” said one of the project’s representative Mikheil Batiashvili.

Georgian specialists will no longer be forced to go abroad for training if they want to be employed in leading companies. Silicon Valley Tbilisi will give them a chance to get all the skills they need and start working in famous technological companies of different countries while still in Tbilisi,” he added.

Silicon Valley Tbilisi will offer three levels of education – bachelor, masters and doctoral degrees.

Professors from Israel are currently in Georgia to share their experiences and train local experts who will teach at the new facility.

It is a big honour for us to be in Georgia, in such a wonderful country. We want to share our experiences with Georgia and train local high technological specialists and software engineers. These are two of the most in demand professions in the world today,” said a representative from the Israel Science and Technology Centre.

Silicon Valley Tbilisi is named after Silicon Valley – a famous area in California, United States (US) that is home to hundreds of start-up and global technology companies, with Google, Apple and Facebook among the most prominent.

The word ‘valley’ refers to the Santa Clara Valley while the word ‘silicon’ originally referred to the large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers in the region. The term Silicon Valley eventually came to refer to all high tech businesses in the area, and is now generally used as a synecdoche for the American high-technology economic sector.

It also became a global synonym for leading high-tech research and enterprises, and thus inspired similar named locations, as well as research parks and technology centres with a comparable structure all around the world.