By ByteBot
New York City now employs more tech workers than San Francisco — 394,300 to 375,730 — according to CBRE’s just-published “Scoring Tech Talent 2026” report. It’s the first time NYC has led in 13 years of CBRE’s annual analysis. Before you start updating your LinkedIn location, read the fine print: the city that won is not the city developers think they’re moving to.
Finance Did the Hiring, Not Tech
New York’s tech industry actually cut 21,262 jobs since 2022. Finance firms added 90,530 tech workers over the same period. Wall Street’s AI buildout — at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Bloomberg — is what pushed NYC past the Bay Area in raw headcount. The developers being hired aren’t working on the next SaaS product. They’re building credit risk models, fraud detection pipelines, and automated trading systems.
That’s a meaningful distinction. Developers choosing between NYC and SF aren’t comparing two tech ecosystems. They’re comparing a tech-company ecosystem against a finance-using-tech ecosystem. The roles look similar on paper. The culture, pace, and long-term career trajectory are different.
San Francisco Still Wins on AI Density
CBRE’s indexed ranking — which weighs 13 metrics including talent concentration, pipeline depth, and R&D investment — still puts San Francisco at 81.98. New York scores 70.38, good enough for fourth place behind Seattle (74.37) and Toronto (72.73).
On AI specifically, the gap is wider. The Bay Area has 98,699 AI-skilled workers. NYC has 67,949. If you want to be where frontier AI is being built — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Scale AI — that concentration hasn’t moved. The headcount lead NYC just took says nothing about where the most consequential work in software is happening.
The AI Hiring Wave Behind Both Numbers
The broader context explains why both markets look different from two years ago. AI-skilled workers across the US and Canada grew 45% year-over-year to 751,000 as of June 2026. AI roles now account for 31% of all US tech talent listings — up from 11% at the 2022 hiring peak. The fastest-growing job title in the country is AI Engineer, up 143% year-over-year.
The Bay Area’s AI advantage and NYC’s finance-tech boom are both expressions of the same underlying shift: every company that writes checks at scale is now rewriting its workforce around AI. Where they’re headquartered determines where those jobs land.
What Developers Should Actually Take From This
This report is good news for developers with AI skills looking for stable, well-compensated work. It’s less useful as a signal about where to go if you want to build at the frontier.
- Early-career developers who want to be surrounded by other ambitious engineers building new products: San Francisco still has the density and startup intensity. The indexed score gap exists for a reason.
- Mid-career developers with solid AI chops who want higher base salaries and lower volatility: NYC finance is actively hiring and paying competitively — often better than comparable tech company roles.
- Applied AI specialists (ML engineers, data scientists focused on specific domains like finance, healthcare, or legal): NYC is increasingly your market. The roles exist, the budgets are serious, and finance employers don’t go through hiring freezes the way consumer tech does.
- Remote developers: The geography calculus changes if you can work from anywhere. The relevant question becomes where your employer’s network and culture are centered, not where the city is.
Toronto is worth noting as a third option. It added 75,000 tech jobs from 2022 to 2025 — more than any other North American market — and ranks third in CBRE’s indexed score. Canada’s immigration pipeline is pulling in engineers priced out of both US cities.
The CBRE headline is accurate. New York is now the largest tech talent market in North America. Whether that’s the market you want to be in depends entirely on what you’re building and who you want to build it for.
