New York’s office market now holds the most tech workers for the first time, with 394,300 tech talent jobs edging out the San Francisco Bay Area’s 375,730, according to a new CBRE report. The numbers don’t describe some neutral market miracle. They show where corporate hiring shifted after cuts in the Bay Area and where finance firms in New York pulled in more tech talent and AI workers.
Who Gets the Jobs, Who Gets Cut
Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center in San Francisco, said, “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.” That’s the hierarchy in plain language: one sector shrinks workers, another absorbs them, and the people doing the labor get shuffled around by decisions made far above them.
The report analyzes tech-specific workers in 75 metropolitan markets in the U.S. and Canada, and it’s the first time New York has taken the lead in the 13 years of the analysis. New York’s rise sits on the back of finance hiring, while the Bay Area’s lead in AI remains intact. The same system can celebrate one market’s growth while another absorbs the losses.
For both the U.S. and Canada, AI tech roles grew by 45% in the past year, and San Francisco and New York each added more than 20,000 AI-specific jobs since mid-2025, according to CBRE. As of June, there were 751,000 AI-related workers across the two countries, the report found. Those include both new jobs and conversions from existing jobs. AI-related roles now account for nearly one-third of all tech-talent job listings in the U.S., per the findings.
The Office Comes First
Office leasing is rising in the markets where AI workers are most in demand. In San Francisco, AI companies made up 58% of all leasing in the first half of this year and have accounted for 30% of leasing activity, totaling about 10 million square feet, since 2023, according to CBRE. The office market gets its recovery. Workers get the pressure.
While overall tech drove the Bay Area’s office market over the past few decades, the pandemic pushed many of those workers to remote jobs. AI, however, has a more office-centric culture and is now fueling the market’s recovery. The report frames that as a business shift. For workers, it means another round of being organized around what landlords and employers need, not what makes life easier.
Yasukochi said, “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,” and added, “Through this whole innovation process, being together and working in person is just much more efficient and innovative.” That’s the language of discipline dressed up as efficiency. The office remains the machine’s preferred cage.
Where the Power Concentrates
In addition to San Francisco, AI leasing activity is concentrated most in Manhattan, Boston and Seattle, according to CBRE. There was concern that AI would reduce head counts, and consequently the need for office space, but in the short term, at least, that has not been the case. Yasukochi said, “It basically changes jobs and creates new jobs, more so than it eliminates,” pointing specifically to the finance sector.
That’s the bargain the bosses keep selling: change the job, keep the structure, move the workers around, and call it progress. The report’s own numbers show how corporate power keeps adapting, not disappearing. New York wins the headline. San Francisco still leads in AI. Finance keeps hiring. Office leasing keeps rising. The people doing the work remain the ones being managed by the market’s shifting demands.
In Canada, there is greater concentration of AI employment, with 60% of those jobs based in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The report doesn’t describe any worker-led answer to the churn, only the latest rearrangement of labor for the benefit of firms, landlords and the institutions that count jobs like inventory.