New York's office market now hosts 394,300 tech talent jobs, surpassing the San Francisco Bay Area's 375,730, according to a new CBRE report — the first time New York has led in the analysis's 13-year history, driven largely by AI hiring in the finance sector.
New York has displaced San Francisco as the leading market for tech workers in the United States, according to a new report from CBRE — the first time the city has held that position in the 13 years the analysis has been conducted, with AI-driven hiring in the finance sector cited as the primary driver.
New York's office market now contains 394,300 tech talent jobs, edging out the San Francisco Bay Area's 375,730, according to CBRE's research, which examines tech-specific employment across 75 metropolitan markets in the United States and Canada.
"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," said Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center in San Francisco.
Despite losing the overall crown, San Francisco still leads in AI employment specifically. Across the U.S. and Canada, AI tech roles grew 45% over the past year, with San Francisco and New York each adding more than 20,000 AI-specific jobs since mid-2025. As of June, there were 751,000 AI-related workers across both countries, the report found.
AI-related roles now account for nearly one-third of all tech-talent job listings in the United States. By market, 37% of U.S. AI jobs are concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Seattle, and Washington.
The shift in tech talent distribution is also reshaping commercial real estate demand. In San Francisco, AI companies accounted for 58% of all office leasing in the first half of 2026 and have represented 30% of leasing activity — roughly 10 million square feet — since 2023, according to CBRE.
AI firms have exhibited a notably in-person work culture, a departure from the remote-work patterns that characterized the broader tech sector following the pandemic.
"It's more of the sort of startup innovation culture that we've seen, where people are in the office [a] minimum of four, but usually like five or six days a week," Yasukochi said. "Through this whole innovation process, being together and working in person is just much more efficient and innovative."
Manhattan, Boston, and Seattle rank alongside San Francisco as the markets with the highest concentration of AI leasing activity, the report noted.
In Canada, AI employment is even more concentrated, with 60% of those roles based in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
Concerns that AI-driven automation would reduce overall headcounts — and therefore shrink demand for office space — have not materialized in the near term. Yasukochi argued the technology has so far created and transformed roles rather than eliminated them, pointing specifically to the finance sector as a beneficiary.
As AI-specific hiring continues to expand across North American markets, the geographic distribution of tech talent — and the office markets that depend on it — appears to be in a sustained period of realignment, with New York's financial industry now serving as an unexpected engine of that shift.
Marc Sabatini is a staff writer at TechEchelon covering enterprise software, cybersecurity, and the regulatory beats that shape both. He focuses on the deal flow and policy decisions that move markets.
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