Celebrating
25 YEARS
AS AN ECONOMIC ENGINE
An opportunity oasis GPEC helps Arizona land Apple, add high-income jobs and leave the ‘Digital Desert’ behind By ERIC JAY TOLL
I
t’s a catchy moniker; an alliteration that swirls off the tongue. A pair of words backed by the muscle of Fortune magazine saying Arizona ranks fifth nationally in technology; an idea riding a boost from Forbes magazine ranking the state ninth in technology opportunities. Dice.com went as far as to place Arizona first in tech jobs in 2013. At last, Arizona has a new brand. This is the “Digital Desert.” Move over Silicon Valley! Arizona is the technological up-
and-comer. Or at least for a moment in time, it was the Digital Desert. Before the concept even molded into a brand, it was gone. As great as “Digital Desert” sounds, it was left in the dust because Arizona is a lot more than silicon, zeros and ones. Opportunity oasis “You could call it the ‘Digital Desert.’ We were ‘Silicon Desert’ before Santa Clara was ‘Silicon Valley,’ but we lost that brand,” Barry Broome, CEO of the Greater Phoenix
Economic Council, is looking out the window into the past. “It’s really not what we are today. It is too limiting a concept for the Phoenix market.” There’s a beam in Broome’s smile. He’s basking in that major coup for the Valley. A 2012 rush-job effort to score a $300 million Apple backoffice last year paid a handsome dividend a year later. Instead of the service center that went to Austin, Texas, Apple is pumping $1.3 billion into a 700-job manufacturing facility for vendor 109 AB | January-February 2014