NYC surpasses San Francisco as biggest tech talent hub, study shows

New York City has surpassed San Francisco as the largest hub of tech talent in the country – and the rise of artificial intelligence is a key factor in the boom, according to new research.

The number of tech workers based in the New York metro area was 394,300 in 2025, CBRE’s research showed this week. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Bay area had 375,730 workers last year.

“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,” Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center, told CNBC.

A woman takes pictures at an event to celebrate World Photography Day at sunrise at SUMMIT One Vanderbilt in New York City on Wednesday. (AFP) AFP via Getty Images

The shift marked the first time in the 13-year history of CBRE’s “Scoring Tech Talent” report that New York’s tech scene – known affectionately as “Silicon Alley” – has exceeded San Francisco’s by headcount.

Most of the tech sector’s biggest AI players, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, maintain significant office space in New York.

As The Post reported, Anthropic has released an entire office building in Manhattan’s Hudson Square and plans to double its local workforce to more than 1,000 employees by the end of this year.

Both New York and San Francisco have shown signs of significant growth, with each adding more than 20,000 AI-related jobs since the middle of 2025, according to CBRE’s data.

Smaller cities like Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth also posted large gains in their AI workforces.

“There’s no denying that AI is reshaping the tech industry and job growth in general,” Yasukochi added in a statement. “Growth of AI jobs in the U.S. far outpaced the broader tech-talent category, which expanded by 1.8% last year even as the tech industry cut some non-AI jobs.”

An aerial view of the downtown San Francisco skyline is seen on Thursday, July 10, 2025. (Hearst Newspapers) San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

San Francisco still outpaced New York in terms of CBRE’s overall tech talent rankings, which are weighted based on various factors, including talent concentration and research and development investment, the firm said.

San Francisco ranked first in the overall rankings, followed by Seattle and Toronto. New York ranked fourth.