25 Years of San Francisco's Housing Market

Jensen Huang thinks “San Francisco is back” thanks to AI

AI is in everything, everywhere, all at once again — and now it’s bringing SF back to life after the pandemic exodus, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Since a lot of remote workers and major tech firms moved out during the Covid outbreak, San Francisco became the empty office capital of America, with more vacancies than any other major city in the US, causing some to worry that the city had entered an economic “doom loop,” with Zillow’s Home Price Index in San Francisco dropping from $1.53 million to less than $1.3 million in just 12 months.

Still, compared to its explosive growth in the past few decades, with the average home price in the Golden City skyrocketing some 88% in the last 15 years, the city’s recent revival hasn’t massively moved the needle on the housing market just yet, which dropped off postpandemic following huge rounds of tech layoffs.

However, as AI startups have continued to attract tens of billions of dollars from Big Tech and venture capitalists in recent years, the city’s tech scene and commercial real estate market are revving up. Indeed, AI companies have leased more than 1.7 million square feet of office space since ChatGPT launched in 2022, per real estate company JLL figures reported by the San Francisco Standard, suggesting Huang might be onto something.