New York City has more tech workers than San Francisco for the first time in 13 years, according to CBRE. The firm's latest Scoring Tech Talent report counted 394,300 tech jobs in the New York metro area in 2025, edging out the Bay Area's 375,730, a changing of the guard after more than a decade of San Francisco holding the top spot outright.
New York added 30,640 tech jobs between 2022 and 2025, an 8.4% increase, while the Bay Area shed 23,900 over the same stretch, a 6% decline.
"There have been cuts in the Bay Area, so the tech industry has contracted the size of the tech talent workforce, and the finance sector has hired a lot of tech talent and a lot of AI workers"
Wall Street has been absorbing AI and tech talent at a pace the traditional tech industry hasn't matched, nationally adding 90,530 tech jobs across the finance, insurance, and real estate sector between 2022 and 2025.
New York City saw 800,000 square feet of AI-driven office demand in the second quarter of 2026 alone, more than all of 2025 combined, according to Colliers. Anthropic signed for 465,630 square feet at 330 Hudson Street in April, and Airbnb closed an $82 million deal in June to buy 281 Park Avenue South outright for a new East Coast hub.
That same finance-fueled wave is also running straight down the coast. West Palm Beach, dubbed Wall Street South, now ranks No. 2 in the U.S. and No. 4 globally for wealth growth, with roughly 11,500 millionaires and nearly 70 billionaires holding a combined net worth approaching $650 billion. Wells Fargo is moving its wealth management headquarters to One Flagler, and a surge in venture capital activity has made the city one of the Southeast's most active investment markets.
Florida ranks No. 1 in the country for population migration for the second year running and holds four of the top six hottest job markets in the U.S., putting the Palm Beaches in position to catch the same finance-and-tech hiring that just flipped New York's numbers.
The Bay Area still leads CBRE's broader 13-metric indexed ranking, which weighs talent concentration, pipeline, and R&D investment alongside raw headcount, scoring 81.98 against New York's 70.38. Tech talent still makes up 10.7% of all Bay Area workers, more than double the North American average, and the region remains the country's largest single market for AI-specific roles, with AI companies responsible for 58% of all Bay Area office leasing in the first half of 2026.