A nationwide analysis has named two North Texas cities among the best cities for tech workers and students.
Plano and Frisco made the top 10 in a ranking compiled by Cloudwards, which scored cities on how conducive they are to helping tech students and professionals thrive.
Cloudwards, which conducts cloud and privacy software reviews, looked at 100 cities in the United States and gave them scores based on 17 key indicators. These were grouped into five categories: livability, internet coverage and quality, career and education, innovation and entrepreneurship, and tech community.
New York City, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco took the top three spots, respectively.
Plano came in at an impressive No.4, aided by obtaining the top spot for internet coverage and quality. It also ranked high in livability (No.2) due to its low crime rate and affordable cost of living in relation to average tech salaries.
Although the city scored lower for its tech community (No.59), it performed relatively well in the categories of innovation and entrepreneurship (No.25) and career and education (No.33).
As reported by The Dallas Express, two exciting new tech-driven projects were announced in Plano last year.
In February, Dallas-based NexPoint Development Co. revealed that it would invest more than $3.6 billion into transforming over 1.6 million square feet of existing office space into the Technology x Science District. The facility located in the Legacy Business Park will have a state-of-the-art science lab and plenty of manufacturing space for top-level researchers in the field of gene and cell therapy.
Last summer, the city joined the ever-expanding global infrastructure for electric vehicles thanks to South Korea-based SK Signet’s plans to erect a new EV manufacturing charger facility, which will create 183 jobs by 2026. It will be the company’s first U.S. venture and marks the first facility of its kind to develop ultra-fast chargers.
Cloudwards named Frisco No.10 in its ranking of top tech cities nationwide. The city received the top score for livability thanks to its low housing cost, tax rate, and crime rate despite its considerable population growth — 2.52% between 2020 and 2021.
Frisco also scored well in terms of internet coverage and quality (No.9) and tech community (No.16). It received fewer points for innovation and entrepreneurship (No.28) and career and education (No.89).
Nonetheless, the city boasts some major players in the tech world — IBM, Oracle, and Amazon — as well as 517 smaller tech companies.
North Texas overall has been generating considerable buzz in the tech field for quite some time. Between the BioLabs incubator at Pegasus Park in Dallas and the multibillion-dollar investments by Texas Instruments and GlobalWafer in semiconductor manufacturing in Sherman, the region was recognized by a Scoring Tech Talent report last year from the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm, CBRE. It put Dallas-Fort Worth in ninth place in its top 10 tech talent markets in North America, as covered in The Dallas Express.