If Deltopia was Santa Barbara’s annual monument to taking part in laborious, then TechTopia could also be its reply on the opposite aspect of the coin: Work laborious.
On Wednesday afternoon, lower than a mile from UC Santa Barbara and simply off the freeway, the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce gathered enterprise leaders, engineers, researchers, and executives at OASIS, a newly opened innovation hub in Goleta, to make a degree that locals don’t usually make loudly sufficient: Santa Barbara is just not merely an costly surf city with good climate. It can also be a spot the place firms are constructing quantum computer systems, most cancers diagnostics, semiconductor packaging programs, and software program meant to form total industries.
“We are home to the highest concentration of PhDs per capita outside Silicon Valley,” mentioned Kristen Miller, president and CEO of the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce. “What we learned was that each individual entity was pulling a lot of weight, attracting talent, and attracting investment, changing the world, and putting out advancements in technology. But there was a longing to work together.”
That want for collaboration was the through-line of TechTopia 2026, a half-day summit that includes excursions, demonstrations, and talks from leaders tied to UC Santa Barbara, Google Quantum AI, Agilent Technologies, AppFolio, and different corporations with roots on the South Coast.
It additionally doubled as one thing of a public unveiling for OASIS, UCSB’s new 105,000-square-foot analysis and growth facility at 71 South Los Carneros Road. Announced final yr, the constructing is meant to bridge the hole between campus analysis and business deployment — a spot the place college researchers, startup firms, and extra established corporations can work in nearer proximity.
Tal Margalith, government director for scientific initiatives and innovation on the California NanoSystems Institute, led one of many day’s excursions by the power, which incorporates open workplace area, moist labs, startup incubation areas, and future semiconductor-packaging infrastructure. Apeel Sciences nonetheless occupies a part of the constructing, however UCSB has begun transferring analysis operations into the area.
“OASIS is UCSB’s new venture,” Margalith mentioned, describing it as an extension of the analysis enterprise on campus that brings college work “a lot closer to the industry” that finally adopts new applied sciences.
The constructing, he defined, is supposed to operate as a sort of “step-up incubator” for firms outgrowing smaller campus startup areas however not but prepared to completely enter the industrial real-estate market. The first startup tenant has already arrived from Virginia, drawn by Santa Barbara’s focus of photonics, supplies science, and semiconductor experience.
Margalith pointed to at least one lab beneath building for semiconductor packaging — the method that turns fabricated chips into usable units by connecting them to wires, optical fibers, and different programs — for instance of the infrastructure OASIS hopes to supply.
“This is a gap in, honestly, not just the California infrastructure, but the national infrastructure,” he mentioned.
For chamber leaders, the constructing represents greater than actual property. It is an argument about Santa Barbara’s id.
Randy Berg, previous chair of the South Coast chamber board, urged attendees to retire the concept that Santa Barbara’s skilled tradition is in some way soft-edged.
“No one will ever, if I catch you, say that Santa Barbara’s a laid-back place for development,” Berg mentioned. “We might be reserved, we might be understated, but this region is not laid back, and you saw that today.”
He referred to as OASIS “the before picture,” predicting that the constructing will quickly fill with “the next generation of ideas.”
The summit’s displays supplied a fast-moving glimpse of what that subsequent technology may seem like.
A Google Quantum AI speak by quantum fabrication engineer Jenna Bovaird pushed the room into the outer edges of physics. Bovaird, a UCSB graduate who mentioned she initially joined the workforce as a result of she “wanted to live in Santa Barbara” and have “a cool engineering job,” defined Google’s work on superconducting qubits — quantum bits that function at temperatures so chilly they require elaborate dilution fridges.
“You can basically say you live in the same city as one of the coldest points in the universe,” she mentioned.
If the finer factors of quantum mechanics left some viewers members blinking into the fluorescent lights, the broader level landed clearly sufficient: Google is pursuing pc programs in Santa Barbara designed to not enhance on classical computing, however to unravel issues as soon as thought-about out of attain.
Elsewhere, Agilent Technologies highlighted precision diagnostics and therapies supposed to raised goal most cancers whereas limiting the collateral injury of chemotherapy. The work, representatives famous, is being developed in Carpinteria. AppFolio, whose headquarters later hosted one of many day’s excursions, showcased the dimensions of its native presence as a property-management software program firm with about 90,000 sq. ft of workplace area and room for roughly 500 staff.
Jessica Star, who led the AppFolio tour, mentioned, “We are literally in one of the best places on the planet.” I believed her, provided that the tour steered us away from the health heart as a result of some staff have been receiving onsite massages.
The firm has additionally tried to tie its office design to native and environmental commitments, she mentioned, from supporting Santa Barbara espresso roaster Handlebar to decreasing water use by landscaping adjustments and serving to clear up a close-by creek.
There was a recurring message all through the afternoon that Santa Barbara’s tech sector attracts uncommon power from its proximity to UCSB — particularly its engineering and materials-science pipeline — and from the best way business and academia have grown collectively quite than in isolation.
As Berg put it, if anybody nonetheless wanted convincing: Santa Barbara is just not laid again. It is just excellent at disguising how laborious it really works.
