California Keeps Losing Tech Jobs

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Thanks for reading! If you haven’t subscribed, please click the button below:Subscribe nowBy subscribing, you’ll join over 72,000 people who read Apricitas!America’s tech industry is in the midst of a historic boom driven by the race for artificial intelligence. Hyperscalers are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers, AI investment is driving record shares of overall GDP growth, and AI systems themselves are being increasingly deployed throughout the economy. Real economic output in the three major AI-related subindustries—software publishers, data infrastructure providers, and computer systems designers—have all skyrocketed over the last few years.The companies behind this tech boom are heavily concentrated in California—the seven largest companies in the world are all AI-related, and five of them (NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, & Broadcom) are headquartered in the Bay Area, while the remaining two (Microsoft & Amazon) are Seattle companies with major operations in San Francisco. The information industry, which covers most tech companies, contributed a full 1.7 percentage points to the 4.3% annualized GDP growth California saw last quarter.Yet amidst the AI boom, the US continues bleeding tech jobs—tech employment is down 90k from its 2023 peak and has declined by more than 10k over the last year. That is a massive slowdown from the 300k-per-year job growth pace seen in the 2022 tech boom or the 150k-per-year pace regularly sustained in the years before COVID. Unemployment rates for computer and math-related occupations have risen roughly 1% since s…