New York beats out San Francisco for top tech talent hub: Trial Balance

New York beats out San Francisco for top tech talent hub: Trial Balance

Adam Zaki and Lauren Muskett

Mon, August 24, 2026 at 12:42 PM GMT+3 3 min read

• CBRE +0.04%

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The Trial Balance is CFO.com's weekly preview of stories, stats and events to help you prepare.

Part 1: East Coast, AI beast coast

Silicon Valley still has plenty of tech talent, but according to new data, it no longer has the most.

New York City surpassed the San Francisco Bay Area as the largest tech talent market in the U.S. in 2025, according to CBRE's latest Scoring Tech Talent report. The New York metro area had 394,300 tech workers last year, compared with 375,730 in the Bay Area, marking the first time New York has come out ahead of San Francisco in the report's 13-year history.

A big part of the shift is coming from artificial intelligence, but also from who is hiring that talent. While Bay Area tech companies have cut jobs, New York's financial services sector has been adding technology and AI workers. That puts banks and other finance-heavy companies in increasingly direct competition with traditional tech companies for the same people.

The broader AI hiring numbers show how quickly that competition is growing, too. AI-related roles across the U.S. and Canada increased 45% over the past year, reaching 751,000 workers as of June. Nearly one-third of U.S. tech-talent job postings are now tied to AI, according to CBRE. New York and San Francisco have each added more than 20,000 AI-specific jobs since the middle of 2025.

San Francisco still has the edge when looking specifically at AI talent and remains No. 1 in CBRE's overall ranking, which factors in more than workforce size. But New York passing the Bay Area in raw tech headcount says something about what type of companies are paying top dollar for these skills, especially as AI work spreads into finance and other parts of business.

There is a workplace angle here, too. AI companies have generally been more office-heavy than the broader tech sector, helping drive leasing activity in markets where AI hiring is concentrated. Manhattan is among those markets, another indication that the AI talent race is starting to show up in companies' real estate decisions as well as their hiring budgets.

Part 2 — This week

Here's a list of important U.S. market events slated for the week ahead.

Monday, Aug. 24 — None scheduled

Tuesday, Aug. 25

• S&P Case-Shiller home price index, June

• Consumer confidence, Aug.

Wednesday, Aug. 26

Thursday, Aug. 27

Friday, Aug. 28

• Chicago Business Barometer (PMI), Aug.

• University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment, Aug. final

Part 3 — Quote of the week

"The key from a financial standpoint is balancing that scientific knowledge with the awareness that we at Brookhaven are financial stewards of taxpayer money. The national laboratories are working on groundbreaking science, and it's really cool. But there's also the question of what is viable for the taxpayer dollars and whether we're getting the right amount of money for it."

Dr. Susan McKeon

CFO, Brookhaven National Laboratory

Dr. Susan McKeon, chief financial officer of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, spoke with CFO.com to explain why the financial decisions behind some of the world's most ambitious scientific research require a different type of CFO approach and what it takes to finance scientific research at a large scale.