Scattered across San Francisco\u2019s eastern neighborhoods are reminders of the last tech boom. Buildings in the Design District are adorned with the logos of blue-chip companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, and Adobe. An enormous canvas poster featuring a white dog on a red backdrop looms over a roundabout, advertising Zynga, the game development company behind the once-viral \u201cFarmVille.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some of the companies still occupy those offices. Some do not. Zynga, for example, decamped in 2021, but the signage lingers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Four years into a frenzied AI arms race, the same cannot be said of the current crop of startups, which are often hiding in plain sight. The reasons behind the cloak-and-dagger strategy are myriad: fears of corporate espionage<\/a>, fierce recruiting wars (opens in new tab)<\/a>, and security concerns for staff<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Consider OpenAI, which has outgrown its Mission birthplace<\/a> and will soon occupy more than 1 million square feet of offices surrounding the Chase Center. Most people walking to a Warriors game would spot Uber\u2019s logo, not knowing that the rideshare company subleased half its Mission Bay headquarters to the AI company in 2023.<\/p>\n This pattern is repeating across the hundreds of AI unicorns and smaller companies that quietly call the city home. Real estate firm JLL<\/a> <\/a>shared with The Standard its data about the nascent industry\u2019s city footprint. Using that information, we\u2019ve mapped the 257 office leases signed by AI companies since 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The names of companies have been obscured for confidentiality reasons, but JLL did share what business sector each serves. Small companies that haven\u2019t officially leased offices or work out of incubator or flex spaces are not listed.<\/p>\n The map shows a major cluster of AI companies in Yerba Buena, SoMa, South Beach, and the Financial District, spreading into the adjacent Dogpatch, Mission Bay, and Potrero Hill. There are more than 20 companies in the Mission, including Mira Murati\u2019s Thinking Machines Lab (opens in new tab)<\/a>, and five in the Northern Waterfront<\/a>. Farthest west is a company in the Presidio, which is quickly becoming a destination for venture capital<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n More than 200 are listed primarily as technology companies, meaning they create software for businesses. About a dozen are in the healthcare business, and a handful are in professional services. Other individual companies are listed in specific industries, such as finance, retail, or media.\u00a0<\/p>\n Together, these companies have leased nearly 7 million square feet of office space since 2020, according to JLL, which represents just over 8% of the city\u2019s total office stock of 86 million square feet.\u00a0<\/p>\n Many of the city\u2019s largest office neighborhoods have vacancy rates of more than 30%, leaving plenty of room for those clusters to grow. But in Mission Bay, where OpenAI is headquartered, the vacancy rate is just 9.1%, according to Cushman & Wakefield.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Brokers say that dynamic is pushing demand for office space into the Design District\/Showplace Square and SoMa, lower-priced markets with similar freeway access.\u00a0<\/p>\n Both neighborhoods posted positive absorption last year, meaning more office space was leased than was listed on the market. The average Class A office in Mission Bay rents for roughly $125 per square foot; in Showplace Square, it would be less than half as much, according to Cushman & Wakefield.\u00a0<\/p>\n For instance, an empty brick warehouse office building at 208 Utah St. was leased to Abridge<\/a>, an AI startup that converts conversations between doctors and patients into clinical notes. The building still has the logos of Strava, Warner Bros. Games, Flixter, and Mode on its facade, but there\u2019s nothing advertising Abridge.<\/p>\n A 10-minute walk away, past Franklin Square, is 400 Alabama St., where AI development platform company Weights & Biases (owned by CoreWeave (opens in new tab)<\/a>) just leased nearly half the offices in the converted manufacturing building. Sources say landlords at similar properties, such as the vacant Takahashi Building at 200 Rhode Island St., are in negotiations with other AI companies hungry for a space of their own.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n While the expanding AI footprint is fueling enthusiasm for an economic recovery<\/a> in San Francisco, economists and researchers point to the lack of job growth as a reason to temper expectations during this supposed tech boom.\u00a0<\/p>\n In short, hiring at AI companies has not offset the decline in positions at other tech businesses.\u00a0<\/p>\n