New York overtakes San Francisco as the AI talent capital
The center of gravity in U.S. tech has shifted for the first time in over a decade — and AI is the reason.
New York's office market now holds more tech workers than San Francisco's, the first time it has led CBRE's 13-year ranking, and AI hiring did the heavy lifting. CBRE's annual tech-talent analysis puts New York at 394,300 tech jobs against the Bay Area's 375,730 across 75 North American metro markets. The swing came not from New York inventing a new AI industry overnight but from two trends converging: the Bay Area's tech workforce contracted through layoffs and remote-work attrition, while New York's finance sector pulled in large numbers of AI and engineering hires. As Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center, put it, the finance industry "has hired a lot of tech talent and a lot of AI workers."
The raw numbers show how fast AI-specific roles are growing. Across the U.S. and Canada, AI tech roles jumped 45% in the past year, with San Francisco and New York each adding more than 20,000 AI-specific jobs since mid-2025. As of June there were 751,000 AI-related workers in the two countries, and AI now accounts for nearly one-third of all tech-talent job listings in the U.S. By market, 37% of American AI jobs sit in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Seattle and Washington — but note the nuance: San Francisco still leads on AI specifically, even as New York leads on tech talent overall.
The office market is the story people should watch. AI companies made up 58% of all San Francisco leasing in the first half of this year, and 30% of the city's leasing activity (about 10 million square feet) since 2023. AI firms lean office-centric — founders and investors want teams in person five or six days a week — which is pulling commercial real estate out of the pandemic slump that remote work pushed it into. The fear that AI would shrink head count and kill office demand hasn't materialized yet; in Yasukochi's framing, the technology "basically changes jobs and creates new jobs, more so than it eliminates," at least in the short term.
What to watch: whether New York's lead holds as a real AI-hub shift or just a finance-sector hiring cycle — and whether the Bay Area's office recovery can keep pace with its still-dominant AI job base.
Is New York's rise a genuine AI power shift or just Wall Street on a hiring spree? Tell us in the comments.
