New York Overtakes Bay Area in Tech Talent

CBRE’s 2026 Scoring Tech Talent report found New York’s tech workforce climbed by 30,640 workers from 2022 to 2025 to 394,300, while the San Francisco Bay Area lost 23,900 to 375,730. The reversal is not just symbolic. It reflects a changing competitive advantage: tech firms increasingly want proximity to enterprise customers and to the industries where AI can be monetized fastest.

For investors, that points to a broader opportunity set than the market has historically priced. If AI is no longer just a West Coast story, the beneficiaries widen — from New York commercial real estate and local labor markets to startups and public companies building AI tools for regulated, labor-intensive sectors such as housing and health care. EliseAI, a New York-based startup automating workflows for landlords and health-care operators, said it recently moved into a 109,000-square-foot headquarters on Fifth Avenue, has surpassed $200 million in revenue and now supports roughly one in six U.S. apartment units. That is the sort of scale that shows AI is moving from experimentation to operating infrastructure.

San Francisco is far from finished. CBRE still says tech workers make up more than 10% of overall employment in the Bay Area, keeping it one of North America’s most concentrated tech labor markets. But the data now show a market that is losing its exclusive claim on talent, even as the broader AI buildout accelerates. That should keep capital flowing to the cities and subsectors where AI can be deployed, not just invented.

The market underestimates how powerful that second-order effect can be. New York’s ascent is a signal that AI hiring is becoming a national competition for talent, and the winners will be the companies and ETFs tied to the infrastructure of adoption — cloud, software, data and the real-world operators that turn automation into revenue. I believe this is an inflection point worth positioning for early.