The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and One Vanderbilt are seen among other buildings in midtown Manhattan in New York, Jan. 11, 2024.
Angela Weiss | Afp | Getty Images
A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
It should come as no surprise that the number of artificial intelligence-specific tech workers is growing rapidly, and the effect of this growth on regional office markets is substantial. For the first time, New York’s office market is home to the most tech workers, thanks in large part to AI, according to a new report from CBRE.
New York’s 394,300 tech talent jobs edged out the San Francisco Bay Area’s 375,730 jobs, CBRE found. The report analyzes tech-specific workers in 75 metropolitan markets in the U.S. and Canada. It’s the first time New York has taken the lead in the 13 years of this analysis.
“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 in San Francisco.
For both the U.S. and Canada, AI tech roles grew by 45% in the past year, with San Francisco and New York each adding 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.
By market, 37% of AI jobs in the U.S. are in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Seattle and Washington. While New York leads in overall tech talent, San Francisco still leads in AI, specifically.
In Canada, there is greater concentration of AI employment, with 60% of those jobs based in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Office leasing is rising accordingly in those 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.
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.
“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,” said Yasukochi. “Through this whole innovation process, being together and working in person is just much more efficient and innovative.”
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.
“It basically changes jobs and creates new jobs, more so than it eliminates,” said Yasukochi, pointing specifically to the finance sector.
