New York Passes the Bay Area on Tech Headcount and Stays Fourth in the Ranking

CBRE's Scoring Tech Talent 2026 report, subtitled "AI Realignment Underway", puts the New York metro at 394,300 tech talent jobs in 2025 against 375,730 in the San Francisco Bay Area, the first time New York has led in the 13 years CBRE has been counting ^[1][2]. That is a gap of 18,570 jobs ^[29], and it matters less as a coronation than as a signal about where a given kind of engineer is currently sitting. New York did not get there by growing fast. It added 30,640 tech jobs between 2022 and 2025 while the Bay Area lost 23,900, a three-year swing of 54,540 ^[3][4][30]. Gizmodo notes New York was only the third-largest gainer in absolute terms, behind Toronto and Dallas-Fort Worth ^[5], and attributes the Bay Area's contraction to post-pandemic layoffs rather than to any political exodus, citing the more than 833,000 tech cuts Layoffs.fyi has tracked since 2022 ^[32][33]. The ranking, which is a different measurement, did not move at all. CBRE scores 50 markets on 13 weighted metrics covering talent depth, concentration, cost and the education pipeline, and the top six are identical to last year: the Bay Area, Seattle, Toronto, New York Metro, Austin and Washington, D.C. ^[6][7]. Quartz reported the index scores as 81.98 for the Bay Area against 70.38 for New York Metro, a spread of 11.6 points ^[16][31]. Austin, the destination executives have been talking up, is still fifth, and Miami does not rank ^[8]. The composition is the part worth planning around. Quartz put the Bay Area at 98,699 AI workers against New York Metro's 67,949 ^[17]. Set those against the headcounts, dated a year earlier, and the rough ratios are about 26 percent of Bay Area tech talent in AI roles against about 17 percent in New York ^[19]. Four metros - the Bay Area, New York, Seattle and Washington - hold 37 percent of American AI-specialty talent ^[18], and the Bay Area has absorbed 80 percent of US AI venture funding since 2020 on Pitchbook and LinkedIn data cited in the report ^[20]. Job postings show the same split more sharply. AI roles were 31 percent of available US tech talent jobs in June 2026, up from 11 percent at the mid-2022 hiring peak, and in the Bay Area the share went from 20 percent to 57 percent ^[21][22]. Non-AI postings have fallen 60 percent across the US and 73 percent in the Bay Area ^[23]. Both markets carry roughly a third more AI postings than at the 2022 peak while everything else collapsed ^[24]. If you are hiring outside AI, the Bay Area is now the thinner market for candidates and the deeper one for available people; New York is where the volume of non-AI tech employment sits. The working conditions differ too. Remote postings in the Bay Area fell to 7 percent in April 2026 from 24 percent in mid-2022, against 18 percent across all US tech postings ^[9]. The report says AI companies largely require full-time in-person work ^[10], and CBRE's Colin Yasukochi told CNBC staff are in the office "a minimum of four, but usually like five or six days a week" ^[11]. AI companies took 58 percent of San Francisco leasing in the first half of this year ^[25]. What to watch: the layoff attribution. CBRE republished Challenger, Gray & Christmas data showing 1.21 million cuts in 2025 against 761,358 in 2024, with tech at a record 31 percent of the 443,604 cuts announced through June ^[26][27]. Cuts attributed to AI hit 101,743, or 22.9 percent, versus 4.5 percent for all of last year ^[28]. Challenger counts what employers say, and Salesforce's filings for 133 further cuts this month did not mention AI ^[12][13].