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, external 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.