California Keeps Losing Tech Jobs (www.apricitas.io)

California’s tech industry is shrinking even as an AI-driven boom pumps record investment into compute, software and data infrastructure. Output in AI-related subindustries has surged and the information sector added 1.7 percentage points to California’s recent GDP growth, yet employment is down: tech jobs are roughly 90,000 below their 2023 peak and dropped more than 10,000 over the last year. California’s share of U.S. tech employment has fallen from nearly 19% pre-COVID to about 16% today; San Francisco lost 11.6k jobs in the last year and remains the hardest-hit metro. Sector patterns are uneven—software publishers, web search and systems design led declines, while cloud/infrastructure providers have held up best—but overall this is the largest, longest tech-job drawdown since the dot-com bust. For the AI/ML community this matters both for talent geography and job composition. Heavy hyperscaler investment is creating demand for data-center and model engineering capacity, but deployed models are also displacing some coding roles—producing an “investment-heavy, hiring-light” posture where high-paying AI jobs remain concentrated even as overall headcount falls. Energy costs and policy (notably California’s high housing/energy prices and new SB79 upzoning) are shifting data-center builds and talent to states like Texas, Florida and Virginia. The net effect: continued clustering of high-skill AI work in a smaller footprint, uncertain substitution-versus-complementarity outcomes for developers, and a geographic redistribution of the AI ecosystem to watch closely.