How San Francisco staged a surprising comeback
W henever a global economic transformation takes place, a single city usually drives it forward. Ghent, in modern-day Belgium, was at the core of the burgeoning global wool trade in the 13th century. The first initial public offering took place in Amsterdam in 1602. London was the financial centre of the first wave of globalisation during the 19th century. And today the city is San Francisco.
California’s commercial capital has no serious rival in generative artificial intelligence (AI), a breakthrough technology that has caused a bull market in American stocks and which, many economists hope, will power a global productivity surge. Almost all big AI startups are based in the Bay Area, which comprises the city of San Francisco and Silicon Valley (largely based in Santa Clara county, to the south). OpenAI is there, of course; so are Anthropic, Databricks and Scale AI. Tech giants, including Meta and Microsoft, are also spending big on AI in the city. According to Brookings Metro, a think-tank, last year San Francisco accounted for close to a tenth of generative-AI job postings in America, more than anywhere else. New York, with four times as many residents, was second.
This has changed the mood of San Francisco. When you live in the city, you can feel AI in the air. Drive to the airport and every second billboard tells you the various ways in which your business can improve by adopting AI. Go to a party and every second guest says that they are working on the tech or in an industry being transformed by it. Barely a day goes by without some nerdy event to satisfy your curiosity about the world’s liveliest intellectual field, from talks about the philosophy of artificial general intelligence to MLHops, a meet-up for AI folk who like beer.
