The Headcount Flip, By the Numbers
CBRE's 2026 Scoring Tech Talent report counted 394,300 tech workers in the New York metro area in 2025, against 375,730 in the San Francisco Bay Area, the first time in the report's 13-year history that New York has led on raw headcount. Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center, put the cause in plain terms: cuts in the Bay Area have contracted its tech workforce, while New York's finance sector has hired heavily into both general tech roles and AI-specific ones.
The two markets moved in opposite directions since 2022. New York added 30,640 tech jobs, an 8.4 percent gain, while the Bay Area's tech workforce shrank by roughly 6 percent over the same stretch as announced layoffs worked through the market. The industries behind those jobs differ sharply: 61 percent of San Francisco's tech workers sit inside the tech industry itself, against 34 percent in New York, where another 21 percent work inside finance, insurance, and real estate firms that have absorbed technologists, AI specialists included, onto their own payrolls.
| Metric | New York Metro | San Francisco Bay Area |
|---|---|---|
| Tech workforce, 2025 | 394,300 | 375,730 |
| Change since 2022 | +8.4% (+30,640 jobs) | -6% |
| Share of workers directly in tech industry | 34% | 61% |
Total employment share tells a related story. Tech jobs still account for more than 10 percent of all Bay Area employment against 4.2 percent in New York, so the region most identified with the industry remains the one still built most narrowly around it.
Why the Composite Ranking Still Favors the Bay Area
CBRE's underlying scorecard weighs 13 metrics, including talent concentration, labor cost, growth, diversity, and education levels, and it keeps the San Francisco Bay Area in first place overall, with New York in fourth behind Seattle and Toronto. Headcount is only one of those 13 inputs, and it is not the one carrying the most weight.
AI is where the gap is widest. The San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Seattle, and Washington together hold 37 percent of all US AI-specialty talent, and CBRE found San Francisco alone has captured 80 percent of US AI venture funding raised since 2020, even as AI-specific roles grew 45 percent nationally over the past year and both metros each added more than 20,000 AI jobs since mid-2025.
Read together, the two CBRE findings describe different things. New York now employs more tech workers in total; San Francisco still funds and staffs the deeper AI specialization. A ranking that reports only the first number tells half the story a hiring decision actually needs.
The Site-Selection Lesson for European Operators
European owners face the identical headcount-versus-specialization gap closer to home, most visibly in London, whose roughly 300,000-to-500,000-strong tech workforce puts it in the same size class as the Bay Area and New York themselves, according to CBRE's own Global Tech Talent Guidebook.
Scale is not the same guarantee in London that it looks like on paper. Industry estimates point to a shortfall of more than 160,000 AI professionals in the UK by 2028, with roughly one in two AI roles going unfilled even as employers keep opening requisitions, the same headcount-rich, specialist-poor pattern CBRE just documented for the Bay Area's rival.
For an owner weighing a US expansion or a home-market AI hire against London, Paris, or another European hub, CBRE's own numbers point to one question worth asking before wiring a decision to a ranking: is this figure measuring where the labor pool is largest, or where the AI specialists actually are, because a site-selection call built on the wrong one lands a team in the wrong city for the job it needs to do.
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