New York Has Overtaken Silicon Valley as America’s Top Tech Market
Silicon Valley has held the title of America’s top tech market for as long as most people can remember. That just changed.
According to CBRE’s 2026 Scoring Tech Talent report — the real estate firm’s 13th annual study of technology workforces across 75 US and Canadian cities — New York City’s 394,300 tech talent jobs edged out the San Francisco Bay Area’s 375,730 — a milestone that marks the first time New York has claimed the top position in the history of CBRE’s analysis.
The shift reflects two forces working in opposite directions at the same time. And what’s driving it says something important about where the tech industry is heading.
Why New York Pulled Ahead
The story isn’t that New York suddenly became a technology powerhouse. It’s that two things happened simultaneously.
First, the Bay Area’s tech talent workforce dropped by 6% from 2022 to 2025, fuelled by mass layoffs. The companies that defined Silicon Valley — Meta, Google, Salesforce, Intel — all cut significant portions of their workforces over the past three years. Many of those displaced workers didn’t find new tech roles in the Bay Area. Some moved to cheaper markets. Some left the industry entirely.
Second, New York’s finance industry went on a hiring spree for technical talent. “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. Wall Street banks, asset managers, and fintech companies need data scientists, AI engineers, and software developers — and they’ve been paying for them aggressively.
AI-specific roles in the US and Canada have surged by 45% over the past year, with both San Francisco and New York adding over 20,000 AI jobs since mid-2025. New York just added more of everything else alongside those AI roles.
What the Numbers Don’t Tell You
Raw headcount is only part of the picture — and this is where the story gets more nuanced.
San Francisco remained first in CBRE’s separate 13-metric market scorecard, while New York ranked fourth. That broader scorecard evaluates talent concentration, educational pipelines, research-and-development investment, and other factors beyond raw job counts. On most of those dimensions, San Francisco still leads.
On AI specifically, the Bay Area’s advantage is striking. The Bay Area has 98,699 AI-skilled workers versus 67,949 in New York, and has drawn 80% of all US AI venture capital funding since 2020. The biggest AI labs — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind — are all headquartered in the Bay Area. The density of frontier AI research, AI-focused venture capital, and elite AI engineering talent remains concentrated in San Francisco in ways that don’t show up in raw headcount figures.
New York has not replaced Silicon Valley in every meaningful measure. It has done something arguably more interesting. It has built a larger technology workforce around an economy that was already enormous.
AI Is Rewriting the Map, But Not Ending Silicon Valley Pull
The pattern emerging from CBRE’s data is consistent with what economists have been describing as the “bifurcation” of tech employment. Traditional software engineering roles, the kind that made Silicon Valley famous in the 2000s and 2010s, are dispersing to cheaper markets, financial hubs, and anywhere companies need technical staff. These roles are fungible enough to go wherever the talent is.
Elite AI research roles are doing the opposite. San Francisco AI companies made up 58% of all office leasing activity in the region during the first half of 2026, and have leased roughly 10 million square feet since 2023. While traditional tech has been contracting in the Bay Area, AI companies have been expanding aggressively — snapping up office space, recruiting engineers globally, and keeping the region at the absolute frontier of the technology that matters most right now.
A paradox lies at the heart of the findings: while AI has been cited by top executives at major tech firms as a reason for their cutbacks, the dynamic expansion of AI has been fuelled by hundreds of billions in spending. The same force that’s eliminating certain tech jobs in the Bay Area is creating a boom in AI-specific ones — and those are still concentrated where the models, the money, and the research culture already exist.
What It Means for Tech Workers
For anyone early in a tech career or considering a move, this data reframes the question of where to be. New York is now a genuine alternative to San Francisco for most technology roles — with a lower cost of living than the Bay Area and a broader industry base that includes finance, media, healthcare, and advertising, all of which are heavily investing in AI and technical talent.
For the most elite AI research and engineering roles, San Francisco remains the obvious destination. The venture capital, the lab culture, the density of people working at the frontier of AI, that hasn’t moved, and it’s not moving soon.
The geography of American tech is becoming more distributed, not less. Traditional software engineering jobs are dispersing to cheaper markets and financial hubs, while San Francisco doubles down on being the country’s premier address for elite, high-cost AI research. That specialisation serves both cities — it’s not a zero-sum story. For more on how AI is reshaping industries and the talent that powers them, see our breakdown of 10 emerging technologies transforming the future.
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