In the Silicon Valley enclave of Atherton, a six-bedroom, nine-bath mansion featuring a theater, a private rose garden and a spa hit the market earlier this year for nearly $32 million.

It found a buyer within 72 hours, more than half a million dollars above asking.

Even in one of the world’s most exclusive communities, the deal was remarkably fast — a testament to the fresh wave of tech riches washing over the San Francisco Bay Area from a booming AI industry and blockbuster IPOs. Nowhere is that wealth more pronounced than Atherton, a longtime billionaire refuge that’s now seeing resurgent real estate demand.

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The town of roughly 7,000 residents has already recorded five property sales of at least $30 million this year, compared with a record of six in all of 2025, according Tom LeMieux, a broker associate with Compass in the area who collected data going back to 2019. The median home price has surged 20% to almost $10 million in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year, PropertyShark data show.

With the boom, Atherton has regained the title of the most expensive US ZIP code, surpassing Miami’s Fisher Island, according to PropertyShark.

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“The demand is among the strongest I have seen in my career,” said Ken DeLeon, a luxury realtor in the area for more than two decades. He estimates that more than 50 homes will sell for at least $10 million this year, comparing the boom to the “frenzied feel” of the 2000 dot-com era.

Atherton’s heated demand offers a snapshot of the Bay Area’s increasingly K-shaped economy as the artificial intelligence industry rapidly expands. The same AI boom that has created extraordinary fortunes for founders and investors has also been used to justify layoffs and worsened affordability challenges for much of the region.

Atherton is one of the world’s most exclusive communities.