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Wealthy AI workers send San Francisco house prices soaring
On a tree-lined street in the affluent Duboce Triangle residential neighbourhood of San Francisco, the top half of a white, Edwardian-era, detached house was drawing visitors from prospective buyers.
The opulently renovated three-bedroom apartment was on the market for almost $3m (£2.3m). And it had been attracting increased attention due to an unusual payment possibility - the seller would consider shares in artificial intelligence companies OpenAI or Anthropic instead of cash.
"The value [of the property] is questionable, but I would like to buy," says a young OpenAI employee who has just viewed the flat with his partner.
The worker, who moved to the Californian city two years ago for a technical job with the San Francisco-based company, is currently renting. He plans, he says, to ask his bosses about the stock transfer possibility.
Welcome to San Francisco 2026, also home to fellow AI giant Anthropic. The city is ground zero for the AI revolution, and its property prices have risen dramatically this year.
They are just astronomical," says Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, a real estate company that tracks US home prices. "People are flush with cash and ready to buy.
In March, San Francisco regained its title as the most expensive city for homebuyers in the US, overtaking rival San Jose 50 miles to the south in the heart of traditional Silicon Valley.
That month, the median house price in San Francisco rose 19% on the year before, and that trend has continued, up 14.5% and 14.1% in April and May respectively, according to data provided by Redfin.
The median sale price in the city as of May 2026 is a record high of $1.76m, compared with nearly $400,000 for the US as a whole, where prices rose by just 1.4% in March, and 2% in both April and May.
The prevailing view of pretty much everyone is that AI money is the driver of the red-hot San Francisco property market. "We have come to that conclusion based on what we're seeing in the data, and what we've heard from our agents," says Fairweather.
She highlights the steep jump in prices in the wider San Francisco Bay Area's luxury zip codes – which includes Duboce Triangle – since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, a trend absent in cities with less AI wealth.
It has halted the downturn that San Francisco saw during the Covid pandemic, when the population fell and house prices softened.
Today, the high salaries and signing bonuses being paid to top AI staff in the city can be extraordinary, even by Silicon Valley standards. Yet even more generous are the stock options that the employees have been allowed to partially cash in via limited share sales.
Last October, more than 600 current and former OpenAI employees sold combined shares worth $6.6bn, an average of $11m per participant, it was recently reported.
At Anthropic, whose main product is Claude, workers were also recently said to have been allowed to sell shares totalling some $6bn.
And with both companies due to have full stock market flotations later this year or next, minting more multi-millionaire employees, many see no end in sight to San Francisco's real estate rises.
"Today's bidding wars are going to be seen as bargains, and they already are," says Rachel Swann, the listing agent for the Duboce Triangle property.
Enrico Moretti is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, who lives in the city.
He says it is still "very early" in the AI boom, and points out that while the city's population and employment levels are rising, they remain below what they were before the pandemic.
There are also opposing forces that may keep a lid on things. Big tech firms such as Meta have recently seen large layoffs.
And as the AI industry moves from its fast-growing innovation phase to one of established companies, it is likely to require less specialized workers who are less able to command the same pay.
Moretti also points out that the lion's share of the wealth from OpenAI and Anthropic's coming stock market flotations will go to investors rather than employees, and they are globally located.
But in the meantime, San Francisco estate agent Matthew Goulden says the current situation is "crazy".
Goulden, who has been doing the job for more than 20 years, says he first started noticing an uptick in prospective buyers – many from the world of AI – late last year.
The upward trend, he says, is not just confined to luxury properties but extends across the market, from single-family homes to one-bedroom flats, and while it is most pronounced in desirable neighbourhoods, it is being felt almost everywhere.
He says that bidding wars are now common, sometimes pushing sale prices millions above the asking level.
At the same time, he adds that homes are selling faster than ever, and the number of all-cash purchases seems to be surging, particularly at the upper end of the market.
Danielle Lazier, another experienced San Francisco realtor, describes similar, but adds some perspective. There has long been a tendency in San Francisco for homes to be listed below market value to get an auction effect going, she says.
And supply is chronically limited – San Francisco is small, there is a high proportion of renters and it has struggled to build new housing (even if the city's new pro-growth, recovery-focused mayor is seeking to change that).
"All of a sudden AI money can have an outsized effect," she says.
Meanwhile, as the new AI boom takes hold, the tale of who gets to stay in San Francisco and who doesn't is told by its residents.
Two San Francisco families with school-aged children, who both asked for anonymity to protect their privacy, recently succeeded in buying move-in-ready single-family homes to meet their desperate needs for more space – but only one was able to do so in the city.
That family was able to purchase in the desirable family-friendly neighbourhood where they had been long-term renters after one parent, who works at OpenAI, sold some company shares last October, giving the family the financial boost needed to buy in an all-cash offer.
The couple say they feel "conflicted and self-conscious" that it is AI money that has made it possible. "We're not ostentatious people," they add. "We've just done what we can with the opportunity."
In contrast, the other family, which doesn't derive its income from AI or the tech world, had to instead move to a more suburban Bay Area town to the north.
Their new home, bought in part with a mortgage, includes a pool and extra land.
It is a different kind of life, notes the mother, and they have mostly adapted now – though it involves a long commute for her husband, who has a senior government job in San Francisco, and they still have "what if" moments.
We wouldn't have left if we could have afforded to stay," she reflects. "It kind of sucks and I do get a little salty seeing all this extra AI money squeeze everyone else out.
The Duboce Triangle flat, for the record, and according to its listing agent, sold for $3.2m – $200,000 over the asking price. Whether the deal included AI stock is confidential.
Source: BBC
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