New York has overtaken the San Francisco Bay Area as the country's biggest hub for tech jobs, with 394,300 tech talent positions compared to the Bay Area's 375,730, according to a new CBRE analysis. It's the first time in the 13 years CBRE has tracked the data that New York has claimed the top spot, even as San Francisco continues adding AI-specific jobs at a pace that outstrips almost every other market in North America.
The Handoff, By the Numbers
The shift comes down to a tale of two labor markets, according to CNBC, which first reported on the CBRE findings. New York's finance sector has been hiring aggressively for tech and AI workers, while the Bay Area's tech industry itself has been cutting its own workforce. Nationally, CBRE's broader scorecard data shows the pattern is not unique to New York: between 2022 and 2025, the finance, insurance, and real estate sector added 90,530 tech talent jobs across the U.S. even as the high-tech industry itself shed a net 21,262 tech positions, according to CBRE.
Over that same three-year stretch, the Bay Area's tech talent workforce contracted by 23,900 jobs, a 6% decline, while New York gained 30,640 positions, per CBRE figures cited by GlobeSt. Toronto actually outpaced both, adding 75,000 tech jobs to lead all North American markets in raw growth.
Why San Francisco Still Calls Itself No. 1
Despite losing the headcount race, the Bay Area held onto the No. 1 overall spot on CBRE's 2026 Tech Talent Scorecard, which scored the region at 81.98, ahead of Seattle at 74.37, Toronto at 72.73, and New York at 70.38. That's because CBRE's index weighs more than just job totals across the 50 North American markets it studies, factoring in talent concentration, quality, and R&D investment, GlobeSt reports.
Concentration is where the Bay Area still dominates. Tech talent makes up 10.7% of all Bay Area workers, compared to just 5.5% across the average North American market CBRE studied, and far above New York's own concentration. San Francisco AI companies made up 58% of all office leasing activity in the region during the first half of 2026, and have leased roughly 10 million square feet since 2023, according to CNBC, accounting for about 30% of all Bay Area leasing over that period.
AI Jobs Are Growing Even As Overall Tech Shrinks
The starkest number may be this one: AI-related positions made up 57% of all tech talent job postings in the San Francisco Bay Area as of June, up from just 20% in 2022, and well above the 31% national average CBRE cited in its comparison of markets. San Francisco has added more than 20,000 AI-specific jobs since mid-2025, per CNBC, roughly matching a similar surge in New York over the same period.
Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center in San Francisco, told CNBC that AI is reshaping jobs more than it's eliminating them. “AI changes jobs and creates new jobs more than it eliminates them,” Yasukochi said, adding that the office-centric culture of AI startups is driving demand for physical space that remote-first tech culture never did. He said startup innovation culture tends to keep people in the office “a minimum of four and usually five or six days a week.”
A Local Labor Market Still Sorting Itself Out
The reshuffling has real consequences for Bay Area workers who aren't in AI-specialized roles. Hoodline previously reported that monthly unemployment claims filed by college-educated Bay Area workers in highly AI-exposed occupations rose by more than 50% in the year following ChatGPT's release, according to California Policy Lab data. Some of those displaced workers have found new homes elsewhere in the local economy: Peninsula biotech firms have been hiring software and data talent shed by Silicon Valley layoffs.
Meanwhile, AI companies born and based in San Francisco have continued expanding their physical footprints even as the broader tech workforce contracts. Local AI firms have been packing into Financial District office space amid a citywide hiring spree, even as some San Francisco-headquartered AI companies simultaneously open outposts in Manhattan to tap New York's talent pool and enterprise client base.
The National AI Picture
Nationally, AI-related roles account for nearly one-third of all U.S. tech-talent job listings, and grew 45% over the past year, per CNBC's reporting on the CBRE data. The total number of AI-related workers across the U.S. and Canada reached 751,000 as of June 2026. Data scientist was North America's fastest-growing AI occupation in 2025, expanding 12.4% with 29,000 new jobs, followed by computer and information systems managers, which grew by 24,600 jobs, according to CBRE.
AI leasing activity nationally is concentrated in Manhattan, Boston, and Seattle, and office leasing overall is rising fastest in markets where AI workers are most in demand, CNBC reports. U.S. AI jobs remain heavily concentrated, with 37% of them located in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. combined.
Costly to Compete
Part of what's pushing tech hiring elsewhere is simple math. Running a 500-person technology company occupying 60,000 square feet costs $90.6 million annually in combined labor and office rent in the Bay Area, the most expensive market in North America, ahead of New York and Seattle, which each run about $73.9 million, according to GeekWire. Average annual tech industry wages reached $211,048 in the Bay Area in 2024, compared to $190,050 in Seattle.
Those costs are also fueling faster growth in cheaper secondary markets. Calgary was North America's fastest-growing tech talent hub between 2022 and 2025, expanding its workforce by 56% to more than 80,000 workers, helped by corporate operating costs of just $40.4 million annually, according to Calgary Economic Development. Waterloo Region and Nashville followed at 37% and 34% growth, respectively.
Yasukochi told CNBC that the Bay Area tech industry's own contraction, paired with New York finance firms hiring tech and AI workers, is what allowed New York to pull ahead in total headcount. But he and CBRE researchers frame the shift less as a decline for Silicon Valley than a specialization: traditional software engineering jobs are dispersing to cheaper markets and financial hubs, while San Francisco doubles down on being the country's premier address for elite, high-cost AI research.
