New York Overtakes San Francisco in Tech Employment for First Time

New York now employs more tech workers than the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the latest report from commercial real estate advisory firm CBRE. It's the first such result in the report's 13-year history, driven largely by a hiring and office-leasing boom fueled by artificial intelligence companies.

The CBRE report, published for 13 years running, had consistently named the San Francisco Bay Area as the top US hub for tech employment. In 2025, that ranking flipped. New York posted 394,300 tech-sector workers, compared with 375,730 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The gap isn't huge, but it symbolically ends more than a decade of dominance by Silicon Valley and its surrounding region in this particular ranking.

Layoffs Versus Steady Growth

The shift stems from two opposing trends. Since 2022, New York has added 30,640 tech jobs, an increase of 8.4 percent. Over the same period, tech employment in San Francisco dropped 6 percent, driven largely by a wave of layoffs at the region's traditional tech companies.

What really pushed New York ahead of the San Francisco Bay Area is the job cuts we've seen in San Francisco, including numerous announced layoffs, and the fact that New York kept growing without interruption - Colin Yasukochi, head of CBRE's tech insights center

According to CBRE, growth in New York is being driven primarily by the financial sector, which has been hiring data and AI specialists en masse for algorithmic trading, risk analysis, and process automation. As a result, 21 percent of New York's tech workers are formally employed in finance, insurance, and real estate rather than at companies classified as purely tech.

San Francisco Still Leads in Pure AI

New York's advantage applies to the overall number of tech professionals, not to the AI industry specifically. There, San Francisco remains unrivaled, employing 98,699 AI workers compared with 67,949 in New York. Tech also makes up a far larger share of the local economy in San Francisco, over 10 percent of total employment, versus 4.2 percent in New York.

The employment structure also differs. In San Francisco, 61 percent of tech workers are employed directly by tech-industry companies. In New York, that figure is 34 percent, with the rest spread across other sectors of the economy, mainly finance.

Offices Filling Up With AI Firms

The shift is also visible in the commercial real estate market. According to Colliers data cited in reporting on the CBRE report, AI company office demand in Manhattan reached 800,000 square feet in the second quarter of 2026 alone, exceeding all of 2025's annual demand. Since the start of 2026, AI company office leasing in Manhattan has already topped 1.8 million square feet, compared with roughly 1.4 million square feet for the entire previous year.

Among the largest deals, CBRE cites Anthropic's lease of 465,630 square feet at 330 Hudson Street, Google's renewal of 410,556 square feet at 315 Hudson Street, Airbnb's $82 million purchase of the building at 281 Park Avenue South, and a 124,733-square-foot lease by startup Tennr at 345 Hudson Street.

This region combines a strong pipeline of university graduates with a growing concentration of AI talent and sustained job creation - Lauren Crowley Corrinet, vice chairman at CBRE

What It Means for the Job Market

CBRE's data confirms a broader trend labor market analysts have been tracking for some time: demand for AI-related skills is growing faster than overall tech employment, and companies in sectors not traditionally tied to tech, finance, retail, manufacturing, are hiring more AI specialists into their own ranks rather than relying solely on Silicon Valley vendors.

For Polish IT companies and workers, the takeaway echoes what domestic labor market data already shows: demand today is driven by AI skills, not simply by presence in a traditional tech cluster. The spread of AI employment across finance, insurance, and services seen in New York is a pattern increasingly repeating itself in Europe as well.