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New York overtakes San Francisco as the largest US tech talent market for the first time in 13 years

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

CBRE's 2026 Scoring Tech Talent report counted 394,300 tech workers in New York against the Bay Area's 375,730, the first NYC lead in 13 years of the study, driven by finance-sector AI hiring as the high-tech industry shed jobs.

New York overtakes San Francisco as the largest US tech talent market for the first time in 13 years

New York held more tech workers than the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of 2025, a first in 13 years of CBRE's annual research and a shift driven by Wall Street's AI buildout rather than any structural decline in Silicon Valley's position.

What happened

CBRE published its 2026 Scoring Tech Talent report on August 21, counting 394,300 tech workers in the New York metro against 375,730 in the San Francisco Bay Area, per the full report. The reversal traces to sector dynamics: finance, insurance, and real estate companies added 90,530 tech jobs across the US since 2022, while the high-tech industry shed 21,262 over the same period.

AI-related roles concentrated that growth. Across the US and Canada, 751,000 workers now carry AI skills, a 45 percent year-over-year increase per the same CBRE report. AI-related positions reached 31 percent of all open US tech listings in June 2026, up from 11 percent in mid-2022. New York's finance sector sat squarely in that demand curve, hiring ML engineers, data scientists, and AI product managers as banks and asset managers pushed automation into trading, risk, and compliance functions.

Despite losing the headcount race, the Bay Area is the more AI-saturated market. Fifty-seven percent of its tech job postings are now AI-related, up from 20 percent in 2022. The region holds 98,699 AI-skilled workers against New York's 67,949, per CBRE. It also attracted 80 percent of all US AI venture capital since 2020. On CBRE's composite scorecard, which weights breadth of tech occupations, cost, and talent quality alongside headcount, San Francisco Bay Area ranked first at 81.98. New York came in fourth at 70.38, behind Seattle (74.37) and Toronto (72.73).

Why it matters

For teams recruiting applied-AI talent in the New York metro, the CBRE data signal a tighter labor market than headline tech-sector coverage suggests. Banks, insurers, and asset managers are now competing against each other and against startups for the same pool of ML engineers, pushing salaries higher and shrinking the candidate pipeline. Any organization hiring AI engineers or data scientists in New York should expect longer time-to-fill and higher compensation baselines as a direct result of the finance-sector demand documented in the report.

The Bay Area picture is different. A market where 57 percent of tech postings are AI-related produces a more specialized candidate pool, but also thinner coverage for general software engineering roles. Startups building on foundation models will still find denser AI-native talent concentration in the Bay Area. Enterprises rolling out AI in financial services will find both headcount depth and increasingly specific AI-skills supply in New York.

The two-city split reflects where AI is being deployed rather than where it is being invented. New York has the scale; the Bay Area has the AI density. The CBRE scorecard, which ranks the Bay Area first despite New York's headcount lead, captures that distinction more precisely than a raw worker count does.

What to watch next

The Bay Area's 57 percent AI-job-share rate suggests the region could reclaim the headcount lead if startup and big-tech AI hiring rebounds from the 2022-2025 contraction. Whether New York holds the lead through 2027 depends on whether finance-sector AI investment continues at its current pace or plateaus as initial automation tooling moves into production.

Sources