NEW YORK has surpassed the San Francisco Bay Area in total tech employment for the first time in 13 years, according to CBRE data. The city now hosts 394,300 tech jobs compared to the Bay Area's 375,730.
The reversal reflects two structural shifts: Bay Area tech firms have contracted their headcount, while New York's finance sector has aggressively hired AI specialists and data engineers. Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center in San Francisco, said the Bay Area tech industry has reduced its workforce while New York's finance sector has added tech talent.
Across the U.S. and Canada, AI job postings increased 45 percent over the past year. Both San Francisco and New York added more than 20,000 AI-specific roles since mid-2025. As of June, North America collectively counted 751,000 AI-related workers, comprising newly created positions and existing roles converted to AI functions. AI roles now account for nearly one-third of all tech job listings in the U.S.
Geographically, AI employment remains concentrated. The San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Seattle and Washington account for approximately 37 percent of all U.S. AI jobs. In Canada, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver hold 60 percent of AI employment—suggesting that clustering dynamics drive local real estate demand.
The economics are stark: AI companies consumed 58 percent of all San Francisco office leasing in the first half of 2025. Since 2023, AI firms have leased roughly 10 million square feet, representing 30 percent of total Bay Area leasing activity. This stands in sharp contrast to the broader tech sector's pandemic-era shift to remote work.
AI development's capital intensity explains the divergence. Unlike consumer-facing tech, AI startups and scale-ups operate on a primarily office-based model—four to six days per week in-person is standard. Yasukochi attributed this to the collaboration demands of the innovation process itself: LLM training, fine-tuning, and safety research require constant synchronous work. The result is a sector that has structurally rejected the remote-work consensus and is now reshaping commercial real estate economics in its two core hubs.
