Report Ranks This US City As World's Top AI Hub. I Was Shocked: Opinion

It's not on the West Coast

Those interested in careers in artificial intelligence or launching an AI startup may want to head to the East Coast instead of Silicon Valley.

I was surprised to see Boston ranked as the No. 1 AI hub in the world, according to a report from Linkee, an AI software company.

Boston? Really?

As a native New Yorker and New York sports fan, my initial instinct was to roll my eyes. Then I looked at the methodology for Boston's ranking.

The data looked at several factors across the major cities in the world: number of available AI jobs, salaries for AI professionals, amount of AI institutions and research centers, as well as the number of established AI companies.

Those factors were computed into an aggregate scoring system, and Boston came out on top. There were several reasons why.

Boston had the highest average salaries across many AI professions, including data and machine learning specialists. It also had among the highest number of AI jobs open and AI research facilities, including Boston University's Rafik Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering

And of course, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undoubtedly churning out some of the brightest minds right now in AI, is only 20 minutes away in Cambridge.

The report deems a city an "AI hub" if it is "most invested in AI, where there are a lot of AI jobs, AI specialists, data scientists, and machine learning specialists [who] get highly paid and there are a huge number of AI institutions."

There were some other interesting tidbits from the report:

• Five of the world's top AI hubs are in Asian cities, including:
  • Singapore
  • Bengaluru, India
  • Seoul, South Korea
  • Beijing, China
  • Tokyo, Japan
• Amid the ranked cities, Bengaluru, India, and Berlin, Germany, had the most AI institutions with nine each.
• Zurich, Switzerland, offers the highest AI specialist salary at $182,000 per year

Here are details on the top cities that make up the world's biggest AI hubs: