San Francisco's AI boom can't stop real estate slide, as office vacancies reach new record

Artificial intelligence has been a big boon for San Francisco real estate. But not enough of one to make up for the broader struggle across the market.

The vacancy rate for San Francisco office space reached a fresh record of 34.5% in the second quarter, according to a report Monday from commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. That's up from 33.9% in the first quarter, 28.1% in the same period a year ago and 5% before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the average asking rent dropped to $68.27 per square foot in the quarter, the lowest since late 2015, down from $72.90 a year earlier and a peak of $84.70 in 2020.

San Francisco is reeling from the twin challenges of bringing people back to the office after the Covid pandemic and a slowdown in the tech market that's led to mass job cuts across the industry. Tech companies have laid off more than 530,000 employees since the start of 2022, according to the website Layoffs.fyi, with major downsizing at Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Tesla, Microsoft and Salesforce.

Softening the blow of late has been the soaring popularity of generative AI and the decision by fast-growing startups to open large offices in San Francisco.

OpenAI, the market leader with a private valuation that's topped $80 billion, announced in October that it was leasing about 500,000 square feet of space in the Mission Bay neighborhood, the biggest office lease in the city since 2018. Robert Sammons, senior research director at Cushman & Wakefield, said OpenAI is continuing to look for more space in the city.

Also last year, OpenAI rival Anthropic subleased 230,000 square feet at Slack's headquarters. And in May of this year, Scale AI signed a lease for a reported 170,000 to 180,000 square feet of space in Airbnb's office