Jensen Huang: AI Single-Handedly Revived SF

The AI boom's impact on San Francisco's commercial real estate is concrete. Since late 2022, AI companies have leased millions of square feet of office space, with OpenAI taking over 486,000 square feet in Mission Bay and Anthropic securing 230,000 square feet in SoMa. This demand has driven 90% of all new leasing activity in the city since late 2024. Venture capital has flooded back into the Bay Area, overwhelmingly targeting AI. In 2024, local startups raised $90 billion, a significant increase from $59 billion in 2023, with AI-related companies accounting for nearly a third of all global venture funding. San Francisco now commands 38% of all top-tier VC seed and Series A funding rounds in the AI sector. This AI-driven hiring spree contrasts with retrenchment in other tech sectors. While the Bay Area's AI-skilled workforce grew 24% in the last year, the region still saw a net loss of 27,300 tech jobs in 2025 as companies like Google and Salesforce continued to shed staff after pandemic-era overhiring. The city's office vacancy rate, which peaked near 36%, saw its first marginal improvements in five years during late 2024 and early 2025. While the rate remains high, the positive absorption is attributed almost entirely to AI firms, marking a significant directional change for the market after years of decline. Huang’s argument centers on a fundamental shift in the engineering stack itself. He describes the transition from "human-coded software running on CPUs" to "machine-learning–generated software running on GPUs." This creates new workstreams, as every layer of development—from compilers to data-curation tools—is being rebuilt for AI. The concentration of specialized talent remains a key factor, with 76,079 tech workers in the Bay Area possessing AI skills, significantly more than any other U.S. metro. Proximity to research hubs at Stanford and UC Berkeley, which produced foundational tech like Apache Spark, continues to fuel the ecosystem.