For 13 years, CBRE's annual Scoring Tech Talent report has ranked the San Francisco Bay Area as the largest concentration of tech workers in North America. That streak ended this week. CBRE's 2026 edition, published August 21, found that New York now employs more tech talent than the Bay Area, 394,300 workers to 375,730. It is the first time New York has taken the top spot in the history of the report.
The number by itself is a headline. The two forces that produced it, and the report's own caveat that follows a few paragraphs later, are the more useful story: a labor market being pulled apart by AI in two directions at once, toward New York's finance sector and toward the Bay Area's AI research core, at the same time.
What actually flipped
The reversal is recent and it runs in opposite directions in each city. Since 2022, New York's tech workforce grew by 30,640 workers, up 8.4%, while the Bay Area's shrank by 23,900, down about 6%. Three years ago the Bay Area held a clear lead; by CBRE's 2025 count for the current report, New York had passed it.
The lines crossed between 2022 and 2025
Total tech talent headcount, New York Metro vs the San Francisco Bay Area. New York added workers while the Bay Area shed them, flipping the 13-year ranking for the first time.
2022 figures back-solved from CBRE's reported changes: New York +30,640 workers (+8.4%), Bay Area -23,900 workers (-6%), 2022-2025.
CBRE attributes the shift to two things happening at once. Bay Area tech employment has taken repeated rounds of layoffs concentrated in software and internet companies outside the AI frontier, even as those same companies invested heavily in AI. New York, meanwhile, saw hiring accelerate in an industry that does not show up in most people's mental picture of "tech talent" at all: finance. Since 2022, the finance, insurance and real estate sector added 90,530 tech jobs across the US, CBRE found, while the high-tech industry itself cut 21,262. New York, home to more banks and insurers than any other US metro, was positioned to capture an outsized share of that finance-driven demand, and AI startups have also expanded into Midtown South office space alongside it.
Banks and insurers out-hired software companies. New York simply has more of the former.
Reading CBRE's sector breakdown
The AI picture looks different
Total headcount and AI depth are not the same measurement, and CBRE's own numbers make that distinction sharp. Narrow the count to workers with AI-specific skills and the Bay Area is still comfortably in front: 98,699 AI-skilled workers versus New York's 67,949, a gap of roughly 45%. Both metros added more than 20,000 AI-specialty jobs since mid-2025, so the growth rates are not wildly different, but the base the Bay Area is growing from is much larger.
New York won on headcount. The Bay Area still leads on AI depth.
Two views of the same shift: who actually holds AI-specific jobs today, and which sector has been hiring tech workers since 2022.
San Francisco still holds close to 1.5x New York's AI-specific headcount, even after losing the overall tech-jobs crown.
Bar length shows magnitude of change; finance added roughly 4x the jobs the high-tech industry cut.
AI-skilled worker counts are metro-level; the sector shift is a national total across the US. Both from CBRE's Scoring Tech Talent 2026 report.
Zoom out further and AI hiring is accelerating everywhere. CBRE counted roughly 751,000 workers with AI skills across the US and Canada as of June 2026, up 45% from a year earlier, with AI-related roles now making up close to a third of all US tech job postings. Four metros, San Francisco, New York, Seattle and Washington DC, together hold about 37% of that national AI-talent total. AI hiring is broad-based, but it is not evenly distributed, and the same four hubs that dominated general tech hiring for a decade are still where the depth concentrates.
Headcount is one metric, not the whole scorecard
CBRE's Scoring Tech Talent report does not rank markets on raw headcount alone. Its main index weighs 13 metrics, including talent concentration, tech-degree completions, wage growth and research investment, into a single composite score. On that fuller measure, the Bay Area still finishes first, with a score of 81.98, while New York Metro ranks fourth at 70.38, behind Seattle in second and Toronto in third. Tech talent also makes up 10.7% of all Bay Area workers, more than double the 5.5% average across the North American markets CBRE studied, a concentration New York does not match even with the larger raw number.
So two things are true in the same report. New York now employs more people with tech titles than any other US metro, a genuine milestone after 13 years of Bay Area dominance. And the Bay Area remains, by CBRE's own composite ranking and by AI-specific headcount, the more concentrated and AI-intensive tech market in the country. Neither fact cancels the other out.
Reading the shift correctly
It is tempting to read "New York overtakes Silicon Valley" as a story about AI moving east. The data does not support that framing cleanly. The headcount flip is driven substantially by a non-tech industry, finance, absorbing tech and AI-adjacent talent at a pace software companies have not matched since 2022, combined with Bay Area layoffs concentrated in non-frontier roles. On AI specifically, the older pattern holds: the Bay Area still has the deepest bench, and it remains the market CBRE's broader scorecard still ranks first.
What the report does capture well is how unevenly AI is reshaping tech employment by function and by sector, not just by city. Software roles outside the AI frontier have been shrinking even as AI investment surges, while sectors that were never considered "tech" in the traditional sense, finance chief among them, are becoming some of the largest employers of technical and AI talent in the country. That is a labor-market story as much as a geography story.
It is also a reminder that as AI work becomes more distributed across industries and metros, the tools people use to do that work matter more than where they happen to sit. A team spread across a bank's New York tech org and a startup's Bay Area lab gets more value from software that lets them combine models and tools freely than from any one city's ecosystem alone, which is the kind of portability platforms like Metir AI are built around.
The bottom line
New York's tech workforce is now larger than the Bay Area's for the first time in 13 years of CBRE's tracking, driven mainly by finance-sector hiring and Bay Area layoffs outside the AI frontier, not by New York overtaking Silicon Valley in AI itself. On AI-specific talent and on CBRE's own weighted scorecard, the Bay Area still leads. The honest read of the 2026 report is that tech talent is fragmenting by function as much as it is redistributing by geography, and both trends are real at the same time.
Sources:
- Scoring Tech Talent 2026, CBRE
- New York unseats San Francisco as the top market for tech talent, CBRE reports, CNBC
- CBRE: New York claims top US tech market as AI hiring surges, Mortgage Professional America
- New York Passes Bay Area With 394,300 Tech Workers, implicator.ai
- Finance Added 90,530 Tech Jobs Since 2022. The Tech Industry Cut 21,262, Business Model Analyst
- New York Is Now The Capital Of Tech Jobs, Edging Out SF Bay Area For First Time In Annual Survey, Deadline
- New York surpasses San Francisco as top U.S. tech talent market, Quartz
- New York Surpasses San Francisco As Top Tech Talent Market, CBRE Reports, Dataconomy
Image credits
- Hero: Lower Manhattan skyline viewed from Liberty Island, New York. Photo by Percival Kestreltail via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.
- In-body: San Francisco's Financial District skyline, including the Transamerica Pyramid, viewed from the Bay Bridge. Photo by Wehrstossgewehr via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 4.0.