New York City has surpassed San Francisco as the largest hub of tech talent in the country – and the rise of artificial intelligence is a key factor in the boom, according to new research.
The number of tech workers based in the New York metro area was 394,300 in 2025 – an increase of 30,640 jobs, or 8.4%, compared to three years ago, CBRE’s research showed this week.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Bay area had 375,730 workers last year – a decrease of 23,900 jobs, or 6%, compared to three years ago as Silicon Valley endured waves of 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,” Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center, told CNBC.
A woman takes pictures at an event to celebrate World Photography Day at sunrise at SUMMIT One Vanderbilt in New York City on Wednesday. (AFP) AFP via Getty Images
The shift marked the first time in the 13-year history of CBRE’s “Scoring Tech Talent” report that New York’s tech scene – known affectionately as “Silicon Alley” – has exceeded San Francisco’s by headcount.
Most of the tech sector’s biggest AI players, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, maintain significant office space in New York.
As The Post reported, Anthropic has leased an entire office building in Manhattan’s Hudson Square and plans to double its local workforce to more than 1,000 employees by the end of this year.
Anthropic’s main rival, OpenAI, has leased 90,000 square feet of office space at the Puck Building in SoHo. OpenAI also put out an economic report in June 2025 stating that New York City could “become a global capital of the Intelligence Age.”
The Big Apple added more than 20,000 AI-related jobs since the middle of 2025, according to CBRE’s data. So did San Francisco, in spite of its net loss of tech jobs over a three-year period.
Smaller cities like Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth also posted large gains in their AI workforces.
“There’s no denying that AI is reshaping the tech industry and job growth in general,” Yasukochi added in a statement. “Growth of AI jobs in the U.S. far outpaced the broader tech-talent category, which expanded by 1.8% last year even as the tech industry cut some non-AI jobs.”
An aerial view of the downtown San Francisco skyline is seen on Thursday, July 10, 2025. (Hearst Newspapers) San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
San Francisco still outpaced New York in terms of CBRE’s overall tech talent rankings, which are weighted based on various factors, including talent concentration and research and development investment, the firm said.
San Francisco ranked first in the overall rankings, followed by Seattle and Toronto. New York ranked fourth.
Overall, the number of “AI-skilled” tech workers in the US and Canada jumped 45% year-over-year to 751,000, according to CBRE.
“Data scientists led AI-related job growth in the US, alongside gains in computer and information systems managers and technology & engineering roles,” the report said.
The influx of high-earning tech workers may be having an impact on rent costs in New York City, CBRE noted.
The average monthly rent in Manhattan was $3,653 as of the fourth quarter of 2025 – up 8% compared to the same period three years earlier, and higher than any other market that CBRE tracked.
Last month, average Manhattan rent hit a shocking all-time high of $6,655 a month, as The Post exclusively reported.
San Francisco saw an average monthly apartment rent of $3,196 in the fourth quarter of 2025 – up 4.7% compared to 2022.
Across the US, AI-related jobs accounted for 31% of all job postings in the tech sector as of June 2026. That’s up from just 11% as of mid-2022.
In San Francisco, AI firms have accounted for 30% of all office leasing activity since 2023.