Parts of Arizona and Colorado are regarded as “star hubs” when it comes to the Artificial Intelligence use and development.
That assessment is offered by the Washington-based Brookings Institution in a new and comprehensive report looking at which regions of the country are most ready to embrace AI.
“It matters a lot whether and which U.S. cities and regions are prepared to facilitate AI development in high quality ways and are therefore demonstrating a readiness to truly benefit from future AI build-out,” says the report called Mapping the AI Economy.
In exhibiting that readiness, cities and regions, says the Brookings document, need to have an abundance of available AI talent, “since talent clusters are critical in generating self-reinforcing economic growth for people, firms, and places.”
Readiness also means an “accessibility of AI innovation and innovation infrastructure,” along with the actual adoption of AI by organizations, because “broad technology adoption remains an important driver of productivity growth and living standards.”
To such ends, the Brookings report classifies the San Francisco, Oakland, and Fremont, California metro area as one of the “superstars” clusters attracting and hiring tens of thousands of workers in the industry.
Superstars cities are defined as having put in place the three most important AI pillars: talent, innovation, and adoption.
Brookings classifies “star hubs” as cities that currently form a “second echelon of uniformly strong AI ecosystems, balancing top tier talent, research, and enterprise uptake.”
In the “star hubs” category is metro Denver, Boulder, and Aurora, with a combined just over 3,500 AI jobs; and metro Chandler, Mesa, and Phoenix, with just over 2,700 AI jobs.
Albuquerque is placed in Brookings’ “focused movers” category, which means it currently excels in “one AI pillar, while maintaining foundations in the other two.” The current AI job count in the Duke City stands at around 400.
While no other regions of the country can currently compete with the metro San Francisco’s “superstars” cluster, large swaths of the East coast, as well as Chicago, Atlanta, and both Dallas and Houston in Texas were easily classified as being in the “star hubs” category.
July 31, 2025
By Garry Boulard
Photo courtesy of Unsplash
