For the first time in the 13-year history of CBRE's Scoring Tech Talent report, New York City has overtaken the San Francisco Bay Area as the largest tech talent market in the United States.
The New York metro area employed 394,300 tech workers in 2025 — an increase of 30,640 jobs (8.4%) over three years. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Bay Area shrank to 375,730 workers, a decline of 23,900 jobs (6%) over the same period as Silicon Valley endured waves of tech layoffs.
"The story there is that there's been cuts in the Bay Area, so the tech industry has contracted the size of the tech talent workforce, and the finance sector [in New York] has hired a lot of tech talent and a lot of AI workers," said Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center.
AI has been a major driver. New York added more than 20,000 AI-related jobs since mid-2025, as did San Francisco despite its overall tech workforce decline. Across the US, AI-related jobs accounted for 31% of all tech sector job postings by June 2026, up from just 11% in mid-2022. Nationally, the number of AI-skilled tech workers jumped 45% year-over-year to 751,000.
Major AI companies have expanded aggressively in New York. Anthropic has leased an entire building in Manhattan's Hudson Square and plans to double its local workforce to over 1,000 by year-end. OpenAI has leased 90,000 square feet at the Puck Building in SoHo.
San Francisco still leads CBRE's overall rankings, which weigh factors beyond headcount including talent concentration and R&D investment. But the raw employment shift marks a symbolic turning point in the geography of American tech.
