New York Just Beat San Francisco in Tech Talent Attraction. Wall Street and AI Are Fueling the Rise.

New York has overtaken the San Francisco Bay Area as North America's largest market for tech talent for the first time, a shift fueled by artificial intelligence hiring and the growing demand for technology workers beyond the traditional tech industry.

New York now has 394,300 tech talent jobs, surpassing the San Francisco Bay Area's 375,730, according to a new CBRE report seen by CNBC. The study examines technology workers across 75 metropolitan markets in the United States and Canada.

It marks the first time New York has ranked No. 1 during the 13 years CBRE has conducted the analysis, ending the Bay Area's long dominance as the center of the North American technology workforce.

"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," Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center in San Francisco, told CNBC.

New York's enormous financial sector has increasingly become a destination for software engineers, data scientists and AI specialists as banks and other financial companies invest heavily in automation and artificial intelligence.

AI-specific technology roles across the U.S. and Canada jumped 45% over the past year, according to CBRE. New York and San Francisco each added more than 20,000 AI-specific positions since mid-2025.

As of June, the two countries had approximately 751,000 AI-related workers, a total that includes newly created positions as well as existing jobs that have evolved into AI-focused roles.AI positions now represent nearly one-third of all U.S. tech-talent job listings.

The jobs remain heavily concentrated geographically. San Francisco, New York, Seattle and Washington together account for 37% of U.S. AI employment. And while New York has surpassed the Bay Area in overall tech talent, San Francisco remains the country's largest individual market for AI workers.

Canada's AI workforce is even more concentrated. Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver account for about 60% of the country's AI employment, according to CBRE. The AI hiring boom is also beginning to reshape the commercial office real estate market.

In San Francisco, AI companies accounted for 58% of all office leasing during the first half of 2026. Since 2023, AI companies have represented roughly 30% of leasing activity in the city, totaling about 10 million square feet.

That is a notable reversal for a city where remote work and technology-sector layoffs left office buildings struggling with vacancies after the pandemic. AI companies appear to be developing a workplace culture that is considerably more office-oriented than the broader technology sector.

"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. He added that companies see working together in person as more efficient during the innovation process.

Beyond San Francisco, CBRE found that AI-related office leasing is particularly concentrated in Manhattan, Boston and Seattle. The findings accelerate concerns that the technology will rapidly eliminate white-collar jobs and reduce companies' need for office space.

So far, CBRE's data suggests a more complicated picture. AI is eliminating or transforming some positions while simultaneously generating demand for new technical skills and occupations, particularly in industries such as finance. "It basically changes jobs and creates new jobs, more so than it eliminates," Yasukochi said.