CBRE published its 13th annual Scoring Tech Talent report on August 21, and the headline number is a first in the study's history: New York Metro now has more tech talent workers than the San Francisco Bay Area, 394,300 to 375,730. Every outlet covering it ran some version of "New York dethrones Silicon Valley." But two lines crossing on a chart don't tell you who moved them. New York added 30,640 tech workers since 2022, up 8.4%. The Bay Area lost 23,900 over the same stretch, down 6%.
That headline undersells what actually happened, and overstates what it means.
Start with what CBRE's own Colin Yasukochi, executive director of its Tech Insights Center, told CNBC: "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." Nationally, the finance, insurance, and real estate sector added 90,530 tech jobs since 2022. The core high-tech industry cut 21,262 over the same period. New York didn't out-build San Francisco's tech sector. Wall Street out-bid it, hiring software engineers, data scientists, and AI specialists into banks, insurers, and asset managers building their own automation stacks.
"There will be all different types of jobs, and I think we will be hiring more AI people and fewer bankers in certain categories, and it will make them more productive."
— Jamie Dimon, CEO, JPMorgan Chase, Bloomberg Television interview, May 2026, via Yahoo Finance
It's also not really a coronation. CBRE's full scorecard — 13 weighted metrics covering concentration, talent pipeline, labor cost, and R&D, not raw headcount — still ranks the Bay Area first at 81.98, ahead of Seattle (74.37), Toronto (72.73), and New York fourth at 70.38. San Francisco lost a body-count race it wasn't trying to win and kept the title that actually reflects depth. The "crown" is a headline, not a verdict.
"The Bay Area is likely to remain … the central location for the AI industry and for innovation."
— Colin Yasukochi, executive director, CBRE Tech Insights Center, Implicator.ai
Here's the part worth an actual CTO's attention, and it has nothing to do with which city gets the trophy. Two forces are compressing the same talent pool at once, and neither is a tech-industry story.
First, a new class of buyer showed up. Banks aren't hiring engineers as an IT department anymore; they're competing for the same AI and ML talent as tech companies, at finance-sector comp scales tech companies have never had to match. Second, the remote option that let companies outside the top six metros tap that talent from anywhere is closing. Bay Area remote job postings dropped from 24% in mid-2022 to 7% as of April 2026, against an 18% remote share for U.S. tech talent overall, and AI-specific employers are the strictest of all, typically requiring four to six in-office days. AI's share of tech job postings nationally climbed from 11% in 2022 to 31% this June; in the Bay Area it's 57%. The talent getting the most in-demand skills is increasingly being pulled in-person, into a shrinking list of zip codes, by buyers who can outspend almost anyone else in the market.
"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."
— Colin Yasukochi, executive director, CBRE Tech Insights Center, MPA Mortgage Professional America
If your hiring plan for senior engineers or AI talent has quietly leaned on "we're remote-friendly, so we can recruit nationally," read those two numbers again. The pool you were drawing from is being absorbed on two fronts simultaneously — by finance firms with New York comp bands and by AI labs with in-office mandates — and it's happening in the six metros CBRE ranks at the top, not in yours. New York didn't get more competitive because it built more startups. It got more competitive because it started outbidding tech for tech's own people. That's the trend a hiring manager outside those metros needs to plan around, not the scoreboard.
VC5 Consulting places senior engineering and AI talent for companies competing against Wall Street comp bands and Bay Area in-office mandates without a New York or San Francisco zip code. If your remote-hiring plan assumed a national bench that's quietly shrinking to six metros, let's talk.