New York City has overtaken San Francisco as the nation's largest hub for tech talent, a shift largely attributed to the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. Research from CBRE released this week shows the New York metro area employed 394,300 tech workers in 2025, while the San Francisco Bay Area had 375,730 workers during the same period.
This marks the first time in the 13-year history of CBRE's "Scoring Tech Talent" report that New York's tech sector, often referred to as "Silicon Alley," has surpassed San Francisco in terms of tech worker headcount. The change comes as San Francisco experienced contractions within its tech industry, leading to layoffs, while New York's finance sector has significantly hired tech and AI talent.
"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," explained Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center.
Major AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, have established a significant presence in New York. Anthropic, for example, has leased an entire office building in Manhattan's Hudson Square and intends to double its local workforce to over 1,000 employees by the end of the year. Both New York and San Francisco have seen substantial growth in AI-related jobs, each adding more than 20,000 such positions since mid-2025, according to CBRE data.
"There’s no denying that AI is reshaping the tech industry and job growth in general," Yasukochi stated. "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."
While New York now leads in tech worker numbers, San Francisco still ranks higher in CBRE's overall tech talent rankings. These rankings consider factors such as talent concentration and investment in research and development. San Francisco secured the top spot in the overall rankings, followed by Seattle and Toronto, with New York placing fourth.
Other metropolitan areas, including Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas-Fort Worth, have also reported significant increases in their AI workforces.