Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the AI boom has reversed San Francisco’s technological escape.
“It’s AI that San Francisco is back,” Huang said in an episode of the Hill & Valley Forum Podcast.
“Now, anyone who lives in San Francisco will know what I’m talking about. Just everyone has evacuated San Francisco,” he added. “Now it’s thriving again. It’s all because of AI.”
San Francisco is far from becoming a ghost town of all sorts, but 89,000 households left San Francisco during the 2020 pandemic, taking advantage of the rising remote work to ship out of state and settled in nearby suburbs. And the family wasn’t just running away. Major tech companies such as HP, Palantir and Oracle have moved their headquarters out of the city.
However, since ChatGpt was released in late 2022, the growth of AI companies has brought life to the city’s flagging high-tech sector and has become part of its biggest tenants.
In recent years, AI companies have been renting more than 1.7 million square feet of office space, San Francisco Standard reported, citing a survey from real estate companies. jll. Real estate agents even called out “Area AI,” a city district where Open Alli is headquartered, due to the dense population of related companies, according to Forbes.
According to the data company, it was AI startups for every three VC dollars invested in in 2024. Pitchbook. Globally, 35.7% of VC funds were sent to AI and machine learning startups last year, and in North America alone, AI companies took over almost 50% of venture capital funds.
AI companies have attracted many people to the Bay Area, where they are trying to capitalize on what Huang calls another “industrial revolution.” Despite concerns that AI-assisted coding, sometimes called “vibe coding,” could negatively affect the number of software engineer jobs, many tech companies continue to hire quickly within the AI weapons race.
“As a starting point, all software engineers are supported by AI assistants,” said Nvidia CEO. “And the amount of code we check in to our company is incredible. Our productivity is popping off the roof and hiring more people.”
With AI, Nvidia allows “to increase what the world wants,” Huang adds, and the company’s revenues increased along with its “hiring ability” and its use of technology.
San Francisco’s population numbers have been responding positively to the AI boom, according to Forbes. After about 7% of its citizens remained between 2020 and 2022, the city is growing again. 57% of Resin Francisco homes were on sale at more than the asking price this February. This has been a 50% increase since 2024, representing the biggest jump among the top 50 metros in the US, surpassing New York.
Also, interest from the AI sector may not be sufficient to replicate the vast number of offices currently vacant downtown completely in a re-farming, re-farming, but the sustained interest in another high-tech boom could create a greater dent. If the industry continues to grow at a fierce pace of 30% per year, San Francisco examiners estimated that by the end of the decade it could occupy about 12 million square feet of commercial property, or San Francisco’s seventh office building.
