New York has overtaken the San Francisco Bay Area as the U.S. market with the most tech workers, registering 394,300 tech talent jobs versus the Bay Area's 375,730, CBRE reports. That marks the first time in 13 years of CBRE's market-by-market analysis that New York leads.
CBRE based the finding on tech-specific worker counts across 75 metropolitan markets in the U.S. and Canada. The report links the shift to Bay Area job cuts and a surge of finance-sector hiring in New York. "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," said Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center in San Francisco.
AI roles are driving the expansion. For the U.S. and Canada combined, AI tech roles grew 45% over the past year, and San Francisco and New York each added more than 20,000 AI-specific jobs since mid-2025, the report found. As of June, there were 751,000 AI-related workers across the two countries, a total that includes newly created positions and conversions of existing jobs. Across the U.S., AI roles now make up nearly one-third of all tech-talent job listings.
Employment is heavily concentrated. CBRE says 37% of U.S. AI jobs are located in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Seattle and Washington. In Canada, 60% of AI employment sits in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
The hiring pattern is already changing office demand. CBRE reports that AI companies accounted for 58% of leasing in San Francisco during the first half of the year, and have driven roughly 30% of total Bay Area leasing activity since 2023, representing about 10 million square feet. AI leasing is also concentrated in Manhattan, Boston and Seattle, the firm found.
CBRE frames the phenomenon as an office-centric wave of activity tied to AI's collaborative, innovation-driven work style. "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," Yasukochi said. On the broader employment effect, he added, "It basically changes jobs and creates new jobs, more so than it eliminates," pointing to finance-sector demand.
CBRE's data ties AI hiring to rising office leasing in the markets where those workers cluster, a dynamic already reshaping demand patterns for landlords, tenants and investors across North American office markets.
