New York has more tech workers than San Francisco for the first time

New York has more tech workers than the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time since CBRE started counting 13 years ago.

The property firm’s Scoring Tech Talent 2026 report, subtitled “AI Realignment Underway”, puts the New York metro at 394,300 tech talent jobs in 2025 against 375,730 in the Bay Area.

New York did not win that by growing fastest. Between 2022 and 2025 it added 30,640 tech jobs. Over the same period the Bay Area lost 23,900.

San Francisco is still ranked first

The headcount and the ranking are two different measurements, and only one of them changed.

CBRE scores 50 markets on 13 weighted metrics covering talent depth, concentration, cost and education pipeline. On that scorecard the top six are identical to last year: San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Toronto, New York Metro, Austin and Washington, D.C.

New York is fourth on that list. Quartz reported the index scores as 81.98 for San Francisco against 70.38 for New York Metro.

So New York is the biggest market by headcount, and San Francisco is still the highest ranked. Coverage that collapses those into one claim is overstating what the report says.

Where the AI jobs are

The AI workforce across the US and Canada grew 45% year on year to 751,000 as of mid-2026. San Francisco and New York each added more than 20,000 AI roles since mid-2025.

San Francisco still leads on AI specifically. Quartz put the Bay Area at 98,699 AI workers against New York Metro’s 67,949.

Four metros hold 37% of American AI-specialty talent: the Bay Area, New York, Seattle and Washington. Canada is more concentrated still, with 60% of its AI jobs in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

The Bay Area has also taken 80% of US AI venture funding since 2020, on Pitchbook and LinkedIn data cited in the report.

The job postings have flipped

The clearest signal is what employers are advertising.

AI roles made up 31% of available US tech talent jobs in June 2026. At the mid-2022 hiring peak that figure was 11%. In the Bay Area the AI share went from 20% to 57%.

The other half of that number matters more. Non-AI tech postings have fallen 60% across the US, and 73% in the Bay Area.

Both markets now carry a third more AI postings than at the 2022 peak. Everything else has collapsed.

The report’s own job-cut figures

CBRE also published data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas that sits awkwardly beside the growth story.

Employers cut 1.21 million jobs in 2025, up from 761,358 in 2024. Through June this year, tech accounted for a record 31% of the 443,604 cuts announced, against 13% across all of 2025.

Cuts attributed directly to AI reached 101,743 by June, or 22.9% of the total. For the whole of last year that figure was 54,836, or 4.5%.

The share of layoffs blamed on AI has therefore risen fivefold in six months.

Attribution is the soft part of that series. Challenger counts what employers say. Salesforce cut 133 more jobs this month and its filings did not mention AI at all.

Asked about the effect on office demand, Colin Yasukochi, who runs CBRE’s Tech Insights Center, told CNBC that AI “basically changes jobs and creates new jobs, more so than it eliminates”. He was speaking about head counts and office space rather than the Challenger series.

The desk has covered both readings. Nomura found that AI is creating more Indian jobs than it destroys. Zillow, which calls itself AI-native, cut 500 jobs and would not say whether AI was the reason.

Remote work has collapsed in the Bay Area

CBRE ties the AI shift directly to where people work.

Remote job postings in the Bay Area fell to 7% in April 2026 from 24% in mid-2022. The figure across all US tech talent postings is 18%.

“AI companies largely require full-time, in-person work,” the report says. Yasukochi told CNBC that staff are in the office “a minimum of four, but usually like five or six days a week”.

That runs against the direction other employers are taking. Dropbox’s new co-chief executive said this month that remote work is staying.

The office numbers follow. AI companies took 58% of all San Francisco leasing in the first half of this year, and about 10 million square feet since 2023. Manhattan, Boston and Seattle are the other concentrations.

Only nine markets created net new jobs

Of the 50 markets ranked, nine produced more tech jobs than tech graduates. The other 41 did not.

Washington, D.C. and the San Francisco Bay Area lost jobs outright, and rank first and second on graduate surplus.

Those graduates are walking into a narrower door. A Harvard study found AI-native startups hire fewer juniors and more elites.

Calgary posted the fastest growth rate in North America for the third year running, at 56%. Global News reported that this meant 28,900 new tech jobs against 3,660 local tech graduates.

Toronto added the most jobs in absolute terms at 75,000, ahead of Dallas-Fort Worth on 37,230 and New York on 30,640.

Who is actually hiring

The industry doing the hiring is not the tech industry.

Since 2022 the finance, insurance and real estate sector has added 90,530 tech jobs. The high-tech industry has shed 21,262. Professional services and the transportation, warehousing and wholesale sectors each added roughly 66,000.

Yasukochi told CNBC that New York’s lead comes from exactly this. “The finance sector has hired a lot of tech talent and a lot of AI workers,” he said, while the Bay Area tech industry contracted.

Data scientist roles grew 12.4% in 2025, adding 29,000 jobs, and finance led that growth rather than tech.

Total US tech talent employment grew 1.8% last year. In 2022 it grew 7.3%.

What the report does not tell you

The study covers the US and Canada only. No European market appears in it, so it says nothing about London, Berlin, Amsterdam or Paris.

The scorecard is CBRE’s own weighting of its own 13 metrics, published by a firm whose business is leasing office space. The report is candid that tech talent concentration carries the highest weight.

The headcount figures are 2025 data published in August 2026. The AI workforce figures run to mid-2026, so the two halves of the report are not measuring the same moment.

CBRE does not break out how many of the 751,000 AI workers are new hires rather than existing staff reclassified into AI roles. The report says the total includes both, without splitting it.

That distinction decides whether AI is adding jobs or renaming them, and it is the one number the report leaves out.