Stanford University

Stanford University, founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford on their Palo Alto farm, is the university most responsible for Silicon Valley. Its faculty and alumni founded Google, Nvidia, Netflix, Instagram, PayPal, Cisco, and thousands of other companies — firms whose combined revenues would rank among the world's largest economies. Across its 8,180-acre campus (one of the largest in the world), Stanford's seven schools enrol ~17,000 students, with the Graduate School of Business, School of Engineering, and School of Medicine ranked at or near #1 globally. Stanford's computer science department shaped the AI era — from the founding of SAIL in 1963 to the modern faculty who launched the deep-learning revolution — and its students include among the largest cohorts of Indian graduate students at any elite US university.