San Francisco: AI capital of the world – and its darkest hour
Within 400 metres, billion-dollar companies and people sleeping on pavements. How San Francisco is being torn apart between an AI boom and a drug crisis – a city tour in four acts.
What is at stake
No place on earth is currently more important for the future of artificial intelligence than San Francisco. OpenAI is headquartered here. So are Anthropic, Databricks and Salesforce. New figures from real estate firm JLL show that AI companies alone have leased 316,000 square metres of office space in the city – around 55 per cent more than the previous year. More than New York, London and Paris combined.
Simultaneously: the worst crisis in the city’s history
806 people died of a drug overdose in San Francisco in 2023 – more than two a day. On average, 54 cars are broken into each day; the perpetrators are rarely caught. In the financial district, people lie in tattered blankets on the pavement while, a few floors above, the glass facades of AI billionaires gleam.
How do both coexist?
For Handelsblatt I walked into this contradiction. In four acts I encountered the city that no longer understands itself: the entrepreneurs, the mayor, the police, the residents. I had dinner with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi in a top restaurant, spoke with Mayor London Breed in front of the Painted Ladies – and tried to describe both realities: the optimism of the tech elite and the despair of those living between their office buildings.
What the piece captures
The narrative that San Francisco is not dying belongs to the founders. They are signing leases, investing, growing. The narrative that the city is simultaneously breaking under a blunt drug and crime crisis belongs to the city itself. The interesting question is not which of the two pictures is true. Both are true. The question is what happens when a metropolis is forced to bear two such contradictory realities at the same time.
I wrote the full city tour – with all the encounters, figures and quotes – for Handelsblatt.