New York Passes the Bay Area for Tech Talent

New York has overtaken the San Francisco Bay Area as the largest tech-talent market in the United States, the first time it has claimed the top spot in the 13 years that the property firm CBRE has run the analysis. The figures, reported by CNBC on 21 August, put New York at 394,300 tech workers against the Bay Area's 375,730.

The gap is narrow, but the direction of travel is not. New York added 30,640 tech workers between 2022 and 2025, a rise of 8.4 percent. Over the same three years the Bay Area shed 23,900, a decline of about 6 percent. One market has been hiring while the other has been cutting, and the two trends finally crossed.

Two different stories in one number

What sits underneath the headcount is a story about which jobs are growing. New York's gains have come from finance and AI hiring, with Wall Street firms staffing up their data and machine-learning teams as fast as they can. The Bay Area's losses have come mostly from layoffs in non-AI software roles, the kind of general engineering headcount that ballooned during the last hiring boom and has been trimmed hard since.

So the ranking flips, but it does not tell you the whole picture. Read the AI column on its own and the Bay Area is still comfortably ahead. San Francisco is home to 98,699 AI workers by CBRE's count, against roughly 67,949 across the New York metro area. Both cities added more than 20,000 AI jobs since mid-2025, so the field is growing in both places, just from very different starting points.

Headcount is not the same as gravity

It would be easy to read this as the moment the centre of gravity in American tech moved east. That reading is premature. Total headcount rewards a large, diversified economy, and New York has one, anchored by banking, media and a deep pool of finance-adjacent engineering. The Bay Area remains the densest concentration of frontier AI labs, model builders and the investors who fund them, and that is the part of the industry setting the pace right now.

The more useful takeaway is that AI talent is no longer something one region can take for granted. Finance-driven demand in New York is pulling machine-learning specialists toward the East Coast, and the salaries on offer in trading and asset management now rival what the labs pay. For a company deciding where to build an AI team, the honest answer in 2026 is that there are two serious options rather than one, and that is a change worth noticing.