https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/345414

In the U.S., there’s no denying that San Francisco is the undisputed king of tech and New York is the undisputed king of finance. Apple, Google and Facebook all call the Bay Area home, and most of the country’s biggest banks are headquartered in Manhattan. There are a few notable exceptions (Seattle holds Microsoft and Amazon, for example), but as a general rule those two cities have a reputation as epicenters of business. But as the cost of living in big cities continues to rise and remote working becomes more prevalent, smaller cities like Boulder, Colo. and Cincinnati are establishing themselves as regional tech hubs. And for these companies (some household names, some you might not have heard of), small cities and towns have been key to their success. In no particular order, here are nine big U.S. companies that are headquartered in unexpected places. 

Tim Sweeney founded Epic Games in his parents’ basement in Potomac, Maryland in 1991, but the parent company of massive video game Fortnite has called Cary, N.C. home since 1999. A suburb of Raleigh with a population of around 150,000, Cary is an unsuspecting home base for the creators of a game with more than 250 million players that brought in $1.8 billion in 2019, according to data from Nielsen company SuperData. Chinese tech giant Tencent paid $330 million for a 40 percent stake in Epic Games in 2013, but the company is showing no signs of relocating from its North Carolina home. In October, Epic Games announced it will be expanding its current headquarters, which has housed the company since 2015. Expansions slated to start this year will accommodate up to 2,000 new employees.