Databricks is doubling the size of its research and development hub at 5 Bryant Park in Manhattan, expanding to roughly 120,000 square feet spread across five floors. The data and AI company says the growth reflects its expanding AI research, infrastructure and applications teams, and comes as New York's technology and real estate markets see a surge of AI-driven office activity.
Databricks is expanding its R&D hub in Manhattan. According to Databricks, the company said in a blog post that “we're doubling our square footage at 5 Bryant Park, growing to approximately 120,000 square feet across five floors.” The post was authored by Tasso Argyros.
The expanded space will include a dedicated Engineering and Research floor, an Executive Briefing Center, enhanced go-to-market areas, and room for future growth, the company said in the same post. Databricks says its New York teams cover the full range of enterprise AI, including AI research, infrastructure and agentic applications, with specialties in reinforcement learning, large-scale information retrieval, and evaluating enterprise AI agents. The company also says its New York office is one of the largest concentrations of AI research talent in the city.
Why Databricks Says New York Matters
In explaining the expansion, Databricks framed New York not as a city playing catch-up to the Bay Area but as a technology center carving out its own identity. “New York isn't just catching up to the Bay Area in tech; it's carving out its own identity as a major AI metropolis,” the company wrote, citing a recent study that found New York City to be the largest tech talent hub in the country, though it did not identify the study by name.
The company pointed to New York's role as a global center for financial services, media, healthcare and retail, noting that more Fortune 500 companies are headquartered there than anywhere else, per Databricks. Databricks said its engineers do not just build AI products in the abstract but develop them alongside the enterprises that deploy them. The company also cited the region's academic pipeline, naming Columbia, NYU and Princeton, along with what it called a thriving startup and venture capital scene, as reasons top new graduates increasingly want to build their careers in the city rather than leave it.
Databricks additionally described New York's time zone as offering the greatest overlap in the United States with major talent hubs in Europe and India, positioning the city to connect its globally distributed teams and attract international talent, according to the company.
New York's Broader AI Office Boom
The Databricks expansion lands amid a broader surge in AI-related office activity across New York City. AI companies leased more than 2.2 million square feet of city office space in the first half of 2026, more than double the sector's total for all of 2025, according to the Partnership for New York City. The same report found that New York City AI startups raised a record $16.7 billion in venture capital in 2025, the city's strongest year on record and second only to the Bay Area.
Databricks is not the only major AI player betting big on Manhattan real estate. Anthropic plans to lease a 16-story office building at 330 Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan and double its New York City workforce to 1,000 people this year, as reported by The New York Times. OpenAI announced in 2024 that it would move into the Puck Building in Manhattan, while AI startup Harvey expanded its office at One Madison Avenue earlier this year.
Talent Numbers Tell a Mixed Story
New York's workforce gains are substantial but contested depending on the measure used. New York overtook the San Francisco Bay Area as the nation's largest tech talent market by workforce size in 2025, according to Fox Business, with the city's tech workforce growing by 30,640 workers between 2022 and 2025 to reach 394,300. CBRE's Scoring Tech Talent 2026 report similarly found that New York became the largest tech talent market, with its total workforce surpassing that of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Yet other rankings tell a different story. The Los Angeles Times reported that while New York led on total workforce size, the Bay Area still topped CBRE's overall technology-market scorecard, with New York ranking fourth. CBRE also found that the Bay Area, New York Metro, Seattle and Washington, D.C. together hold the largest U.S. AI-specialty talent clusters, accounting for 37% of the national total, and that the AI-skilled tech-talent workforce across the U.S. and Canada grew 45% year over year to 751,000 workers by mid-2026.
A Growing Company Behind the Lease
The Manhattan expansion follows a run of major milestones for Databricks. The company announced on August 13 that it had surpassed a $7 billion revenue run-rate after growing more than 80% year over year during its second quarter, and that it had closed a $5 billion strategic funding round at a $190 billion valuation. Databricks says it is headquartered in San Francisco with more than 30 offices around the globe, and that more than 20,000 organizations, including 70% of the Fortune 500, rely on its products daily.
The New York hub traces back to a research and engineering operation Databricks announced in January focused on agentic AI, large language models, data infrastructure and agentic business applications. Office market data compiled by Colliers and reported by Commercial Observer shows Class A office asking rents in Midtown averaging $91.08 per square foot in the third quarter of 2026, underscoring the premium AI firms are paying to plant flags in the neighborhood around Bryant Park.
