New York passes the Bay Area on tech headcount for the first time in 13 years
CBRE's Scoring Tech Talent report puts New York at 394,300 tech workers against the Bay Area's 375,730 — the first lead in the ranking's 13 years, driven by an 8% New York gain on finance-sector AI hiring while Bay Area employment fell 6% since 2022. The frontier hasn't moved: San Francisco still leads on AI roles specifically and ranks first on CBRE's composite measure, and AI firms took 58% of San Francisco office leasing in the first half of the year, with five- and six-day in-office norms fueling that recovery.
Source: cnbc.com ↗
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.
Colin Yasukochi, CBRE Tech Insights Center
Why this matters
- → Geographic tech power shift: New York's finance AI hiring outpaces Bay Area job losses
- → Office culture: AI's 5-6 day in-office norm reversing post-pandemic remote trends
- → Market timing: 45% AI job growth in one year, 751K workers across US/Canada
AI rewrites the office map