If a substantial fraction of the semiconductor industry (IDM + fabless + fab suppliers) is in Silicon Valley, then the name still makes sense even if there is a lot of other money floating around the area.

also, why would this make sense:

> of course, excepting Apple

Apple is probably the single largest customer of TSMC, and their products depend on their semiconductor design team (especially true now that they are moving to in-house CPUs for laptop/desktop). Why throw them out from a discussion of companies that care about fabs?

If one asked the question of which location in the US the semiconductor industry has the highest footprint in, the answer would definitely be the Bay Area (maybe California, to include San Diego, etc).

But if you ask the question of which sectors the Bay Area has the largest investment and footprint in, then semiconductors would (unfortunately) be only a small part of that. That uncomfortable truth (which is exactly what I'm trying to point out in the above comment) is that market valuations today seem to be driven by the things built on top (in particular, the "data economy" and the effectiveness of personalization-driven consumption increases), rather than (for eg.) the semiconductor engg which is crucial to build those platforms.

An analogue of this is when the Ford CEO speculated in 2018 to the effect that it might be more profitable to sell customer data derived by selling cars, than from selling cars in the first place.

TSMC would be third and then there would be a gap again...