New York Overtakes the Bay Area as North America's Largest Tech AI Talent Market

[Scarlett89]

A new annual CBRE report shows the New York metro area's tech talent workforce reached 394,300 in 2025, edging out the San Francisco Bay Area's 375,730 for the first time in the report's thirteen year history. The Bay Area's tech workforce actually shrank by about 6 percent between 2022 and 2025 due to ongoing layoffs, while New York's grew by more than 8 percent over that exact same period.

A CBRE executive quoted in the coverage points to New York's finance sector specifically absorbing a lot of AI talent alongside its traditional tech hiring, which fits a broader pattern of tech workers spreading into industries that were never historically considered tech companies in the first place. That structural advantage means tech talent in New York can move across different industries without necessarily having to leave the metropolitan area at all, something Silicon Valley's more single industry economy has never really offered in the same way.

San Francisco still holds the top overall spot in CBRE's broader thirteen indicator ranking, which combines things like talent depth, growth rate, and concentration rather than measuring raw headcount, and the Bay Area continues to dominate specifically in AI related hiring. AI related jobs across the US and Canada grew by 45 percent to about 751,000 workers as of mid 2026, with 37 percent of all US AI jobs still concentrated in the Bay Area, New York, Seattle, and Washington combined.

So the actual headline here is a little more nuanced than a simple crown changing hands cleanly from one coast to the other. New York now has more raw tech workers in total, but San Francisco remains the denser and more specialized AI specific hub by most other measures the report tracks. Both cities added more than 20,000 AI specific jobs since mid 2025 according to the same data, which suggests overall growth for the industry broadly rather than a true zero sum shift of jobs directly from one coast to the other.

Still a genuinely symbolic milestone worth noting after New York has spent literal decades being talked about as tech's permanent number two behind Silicon Valley

New York unseats San Francisco as the top market for tech talent, CBRE reportswww.cnbc.com

[Wrench]

The finance sector absorbing tech and AI talent in New York is honestly the most underrated detail buried in this entire report. Wall Street has quietly been hiring machine learning engineers for years now for algorithmic trading and risk modeling work, and that demand was never going to show up in headlines about Silicon Valley specifically.

[Zach72]

Thirteen years of this same report consistently naming San Francisco as the largest market makes this specific flip genuinely noteworthy on its own even setting aside all the more nuanced caveats buried underneath the headline number

[Jaguar43]

Cost of living has to be a meaningfully quiet factor in all of this even though it barely gets a direct mention anywhere in this particular report. Companies chasing genuinely lower overall costs while still needing access to serious deep talent pools would naturally gravitate toward New York over the Bay Area at the margins over time

[Clever Erin]

As someone actually job hunting in tech right now, the ability to pivot between finance, media, and straight tech roles without literally relocating cities is a genuinely real and underrated advantage that New York offers over the Bay Area's much more single industry dependent economy.

[Raven45]

Layoffs shrinking the Bay Area's total workforce while New York simply kept steadily growing is a much less dramatic and more boring story than an actual exodus narrative, but it is probably the more accurate explanation for what is actually happening here.
People are not necessarily fleeing San Francisco specifically, the jobs there are simply disappearing at a faster net rate than they are anywhere else.

[Dolphin64]

Worth remembering San Francisco still wins the broader thirteen indicator ranking even while losing on this one specific raw headcount metric. Losing the sheer number crown does not mean losing the actual quality or density crown, and those genuinely are not the same thing at all despite how headlines tend to frame this kind of shift.

[MegaPete71]

The AI specific hiring numbers tell a completely different and honestly more interesting story than the plain headcount headline does. Both coasts are adding roughly similar numbers of AI jobs even as total tech headcount trends move in opposite directions between them, which suggests genuine overall growth rather than one region simply cannibalizing the other's jobs directly