The symbol is strong. According to CBRE’s 13th annual Scoring Tech Talent report from the real estate brokerage, the New York metropolitan area counted 394,300 tech jobs in 2025, versus 375,730 for the San Francisco Bay Area.
An unprecedented shift since the study began, it now reviews more than twenty tech roles (developers, data scientists, hardware engineers, systems managers) across 75 American and Canadian metropolitan markets.
The reversal reflects two labor-market dynamics that have diverged since 2022. New York added 30,640 tech jobs in three years (+8.4%), while the Bay Area shed 23,900 (-6%) over the same period.
Colin Yasukochi, director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center in San Francisco, sums up the mechanism for CNBC: hiring waves have trimmed the payroll on the California side, while the New York financial sector has massively recruited tech and AI talent.
Nationwide, the trend is confirmed: between 2022 and 2025, finance, insurance, and real estate created 90,530 tech jobs in the United States, while the tech industry itself shed 21,262 net.
In concrete terms, a developer employed by a Midtown bank now counts as much in CBRE’s statistics as an engineer at a Bay Area startup. This broad definition of “tech talent” explains a large part of the statistical shift.
San Francisco Keeps the AI Crown
CBRE takes care to nuance the headline that has circulated in the U.S. press: in its weighted ranking, which aggregates thirteen criteria (talent concentration, salaries, rents, pool of graduates, R&D),
San Francisco remains number one with a score of 81.98, well ahead of New York (70.38, 4th place). The podium (San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto) is unchanged from last year.
And it is squarely AI where the gap is most pronounced. The Bay Area houses 98,699 AI-qualified workers, compared with 67,949 in New York, and continues to attract about 80% of U.S. AI funding rounds since 2020.
AI-related roles now account for 57% of local tech job postings there, versus 31% on average nationwide. A share that was only 11% by mid-2022.
This specialization is also visible in office real estate. AI companies accounted for 58% of leased space in the Bay Area in the first half of 2026, for a cumulative total of about 10 million square feet leased since 2023.
New York, A New Corporate AI Stronghold
Meanwhile, Manhattan is also drawing the sector’s giants. Anthropic signed in April a lease for more than 465,000 square feet at 330 Hudson Street, while Airbnb acquired an 82‑million‑dollar building on Park Avenue South to house its East Coast hub.
Demand for office space from AI companies in New York reached 800,000 square feet in the second quarter of 2026, surpassing the total for all of 2025 on its own.
Another indicator revealing the market structure: 61% of San Francisco’s tech workers are directly employed by technology companies, compared with only 34% in New York, where finance, health, and media absorb most tech recruitment.
A continent-wide view shows AI continuing to pull tech employment upward: the number of American and Canadian workers reporting skills in artificial intelligence jumped 45% year over year to about 751,000 people by mid-2026. Toronto leads the growth in absolute terms with 75,000 tech jobs created over the period, driven by a 60% AI‑employment concentration within the Toronto–Montreal–Vancouver triangle.
