New York has surpassed the San Francisco Bay Area as the largest tech talent market in the United States for the first time, according to CBRE's annual Scoring Tech Talent report released this week.
The New York metropolitan area counted 394,300 tech workers, ahead of the Bay Area's 375,730, in the first such reversal in the 13 years the real estate firm has tracked the data.
The shift reflects two labor markets moving in opposite directions. New York's tech workforce grew by more than 8% between 2022 and 2025, while the Bay Area's contracted by about 6% over the same period.
Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center in San Francisco, said cuts in the Bay Area shrank the tech industry's own workforce while New York's finance sector hired aggressively for technology and artificial intelligence roles, according to CNBC.
The Bay Area still holds the top overall position in CBRE's scorecard, which weighs concentration, talent quality and research investment alongside headcount. The region scored 81.98, followed by Seattle at 74.37, Toronto at 72.73 and New York at 70.38.
Concentration remains the Bay Area's advantage. Tech workers make up 10.7% of the region's total workforce, compared with an average of 5.5% across the North American markets CBRE studied.
San Francisco also leads in artificial intelligence specifically, with 98,699 AI workers against 67,949 in the New York metro area. AI roles across the United States and Canada grew 45% in the past year, and both cities added more than 20,000 AI jobs since mid-2025. As of June, there were 751,000 AI-related workers across the two countries.
The hiring is reshaping office demand. AI companies accounted for 58% of all leasing activity in San Francisco during the first half of 2026 and roughly 30% of Bay Area leasing since 2023, totaling about 10 million square feet.
In New York, AI startups have clustered in Midtown South and other central districts. Lauren Crowley Corrinet, vice chairman of CBRE's consulting group in New York, said the sheer scale of the market supports both early-stage growth and rapid expansion.
Tech talent, as CBRE defines it, includes highly skilled workers in more than 20 technology-oriented occupations employed across industries including health care, financial services and government.