Infinite Loop is a street

Street

A street is a paved public thoroughfare in a built environment. It is a public parcel of land adjoining buildings in an urban context, on which people may freely assemble, interact, and move about. A street can be as simple as a level patch of dirt, but is more often paved with a hard, durable...

 encircling the six main buildings of Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California

Cupertino, California

Cupertino is an affluent suburban city in Santa Clara County, California in the U.S., directly west of San Jose on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley with portions extending into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The population was 58,302 at the time of the 2010 census. Forbes...

. Each building has a number which corresponds to its single-digit address on the Loop, and so Apple's official mailing address is "1 Infinite Loop". The numbers increment in the clockwise direction. Employees often refer to the buildings as IL1 through IL6 . The loop connects to Mariani Avenue, which was the former street address of Apple HQ; early printed material contains the address "20525 Mariani Avenue," which is the address of a building that still stands directly across on the other side of De Anza Boulevard.

Infinite Loop is at the southeast corner of De Anza Boulevard and Interstate 280

Interstate 280 (California)

Interstate 280 is a 57-mile long north–south Interstate Highway in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It connects San Jose and San Francisco, running along just to the west of the cities of San Francisco Peninsula for most of its route.I-280 from its northern end at King...

. The main office, 1 Infinite Loop, directly faces De Anza Boulevard. There are other buildings on Apple's campus which are in the proximity of, but not on Infinite Loop. Apple has purchased nearby parcels of land (one mile east) on which to build a second campus.

The name was inspired by the programming concept of the infinite loop

Infinite loop

An infinite loop is a sequence of instructions in a computer program which loops endlessly, either due to the loop having no terminating condition, having one that can never be met, or one that causes the loop to start over...

.

Infinite Loop is actually a private U-shaped crescent that joins up with the public street Mariani Avenue to form a loop.

History

Construction of the Infinite Loop campus was completed in 1993 by Sobrato Development Cos. Prior to 1997, activity on the campus was restricted to Research and Development activities, and each building was referred to as R&D 1 through R&D 6. Shortly after the return of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...

 to Apple when Apple consolidated the number of buildings it occupied, many non-R&D related functions moved to the campus, so the Research and Development name was dropped, and the buildings were renamed IL 1 through IL 6. The local BJ's Restaurant & Brewery, just off campus, is often jokingly referred to as "IL 7".

Before Infinite Loop was built, the location was occupied by Four Phase Systems (which was later acquired by Motorola

Motorola

Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...

).