TL;DR — Key Takeaways
- New York City has overtaken the San Francisco Bay Area as North America’s largest tech talent hub, with 394,300 tech workers.
- AI hiring is helping drive the shift, with specialized AI roles across North America increasing 45% to 751,000 workers.
- The Bay Area remains the leading AI hub, while New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C., also account for a large share of U.S. AI employment.
Fueled by a surge in artificial intelligence (AI) hiring, New York City has claimed the top spot as the largest technology talent hub in North America, overtaking the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time in more than a decade.
According to a report released by commercial real estate services firm CBRE, New York is now home to 394,300 tech workers, narrowly surpassing the Bay Area’s 375,730. The annual study, which analyzes tech-specific employment across 75 metropolitan markets in the United States and Canada, marked the first time in its 13-year history that New York led the ranking.
Industry experts attribute the shift to a combination of tech industry cutbacks in California and rapid hiring in New York’s dominant financial sector, which has aggressively recruited software engineers and AI specialists.
Despite losing the overall tech talent crown, the San Francisco Bay Area remains the undisputed capital for AI specifically. Together, the Bay Area and New York added more than 20,000 AI jobs over the past year. Across North America, specialized AI roles surged by 45%, reaching a total of 751,000 workers by mid-2026 through both new creation and role conversions.
Today, AI-related positions make up nearly one-third of all tech job openings in the United States. A heavy concentration of this workforce remains clustered in key metros: 37% of all U.S. AI jobs are located across the Bay Area, New York, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In Canada, AI employment is even more centralized, with Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver capturing 60% of the national market.
This rapid expansion is delivering a much-needed boost to commercial real estate markets. Concerns that automation might shrink corporate headcounts and reduce office footprints have so far proven unfounded. Instead, AI development is generating new job categories and changing workplace dynamics.
Unlike the broader tech sector, which embraced widespread remote work following the pandemic, the emerging AI ecosystem is marked by an in-person, office-centric culture. In San Francisco, AI companies accounted for 58% of all commercial office leasing in the first half of the year, bringing total AI leasing in the city to approximately 10 million square feet since 2023. Beyond California, office leasing tied to AI is most concentrated in Manhattan, Boston, and Seattle.
Real estate analysts note that AI startups operate with an intense startup innovation culture, with teams frequently working in person five or six days a week. For an office sector still recovering from post-pandemic vacancies, the collaborative demands of artificial intelligence are proving to be a powerful engine for commercial recovery.
