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Every tech IPO cycle promised to spread wealth around. None of them ever did

Tech IPO fortunes keep landing in the same zip codes, with the AI boom expected to pack 12,000 new millionaires into San Francisco alone

Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images

The conventional story about tech wealth is that it spreads. A company goes public, employees scatter, secondary cities benefit, and the money radiates outward.

Three decades of data tell the opposite story. IPO-driven wealth pulls money, talent, and services into a tighter and tighter footprint, and each cycle narrows the geography further.

The next wave is already arriving. SpaceX's IPO earlier this year sent billions to employees based in the Bay Area, and OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to follow, together creating about 12,000 new millionaires concentrated almost entirely in San Francisco.

Every previous wave of tech IPO wealth has concentrated in the same few cities rather than diffusing outward. The AI wave, which is larger than any of its predecessors, is following the same path.

Three decades of innovation-sector jobs in five cities

Between 2005 and 2017, five cities absorbed more than nine-tenths of all new innovation-sector jobs in the United States, according to a Brookings Institution report produced with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and San Diego captured nearly all of the growth while the rest of the country's tech sector barely expanded.

The funding pipeline reinforces the same pattern. In Q2 2025, major hubs accounted for roughly three-quarters of all venture funding even though they hosted only about half the deals, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. The Bay Area's share has only grown........

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