Here’s how much top tech jobs in California pay, according to job ads
Steve Proehl | Corbis Unreleased | Getty Images
A new law that went into effect this week requires most California employers to disclose salaries on job listings.
The law affects every company with more than 15 employees looking to fill a job that could be performed from the state of California. It covers hourly and temporary work, all the way up to openings for highly-paid technology executives.
That means it’s now possible to know the salaries top tech companies pay their workers. For example:
Notably, these salary listings do not include any bonuses or equity grants, which many tech companies use to attract and retain employees.
California is the latest and biggest state to enact a pay transparency law, joining Colorado and New York City, which had previously passed similar policies. But more than 20% of Fortune 500 companies are based in California, including leaders in technology and media, and advocates hope that California’s new law will be the tipping point that turns posting salary information into standard practice.
In the U.S., there are now 13 cities and states which require employers to share salary information, covering about one in four workers in the U.S., according to Payscale, a software firm focusing on salary comparison.
California’s pay transparency law is intended to reduce gender and race pay gaps and help minorities and women better compete in the labor market. For example, people can compare their current pay with job listings with the same job title and see if they’re being underpaid.
Women earn about 83 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to the U.S. Census.
“You’re going to need a lot of different elements in place in order for men and women to get paid the same for the same amount of work and the same experience,” said Monique Limón, the California state senator who sponsored the new law. “And one of those is transparency around salary ranges.”
But the new disclosures under the law might not tell the whole story of what a job pays. Companies can choose to display wide pay ranges, violating the spirit of the law, and the law doesn’t require companies to reveal bonuses or equity compensation.
The law could also penalize ambitious workers who are gunning for more money because of their experience or skills, the California Chamber of Commerce said last year when opposing the bill. Some employers might be wary of posting pay to prevent bidding wars for top talent.
In a comment to CNBC, a Meta spokesperson said, “To ensure fairness and eliminate bias in our compensation systems, we regularly conduct pay equity analysis, and our latest analysis confirms that we continue to have pay equity across genders globally and by race in the US for people in similar jobs.” The firm also noted that it generally pays full-time employees in equity as well as cash.
Apple and Google did not immediately return requests for comment.
The new law
There are two primary components to California Senate Bill No. 1162, which was passed in September and went into effect on Jan. 1.
First is the pay transparency component on job listings, which applies to any company with more than 15 employees if the job could be done in California.
The second part requires companies with more than 100 employees to submit a pay data report to the state of California with detailed salary information broken down by race, sex, and job category. Companies have to provide a similar report on the federal level, but California now requires more details.
Employers are required to maintain detailed records of each job title and its wage history, and California’s Labor Commissioner can inspect those records. California can enforce the law through fines and can investigate violations. The reports won’t be published publicly under the new law.
California state Sen. Limón said that the bill helps narrow pay gaps by giving information to people so they can negotiate their pay better or determine if they are being underpaid for their experience and skills. It will also help the state check to make sure companies are following existing equal pay laws.
“The reason this is important is that we are not able to address problems that we cannot see,” Limón said.
Limón also hopes that the requirement will help California companies recruit the best talent and compete against other states which don’t require employers to post salaries. Ultimately, she says, helping making sure women and people of color are getting paid equally will help California’s economy.
Pay transparency laws could cause competition among companies that need to compete for the best talent. Some companies could even choose to post salary ranges on job listings where it’s not required.
“The consequence is not just for an individual, there are economic consequences for the state for people being underpaid,” Limón said. “That means that their earning power and how they’re able to contribute to this economy in California, whether it’s through a sales market, a housing market, through investment, is limited, because they are not being paid equitably.”
Loopholes
The new law doesn’t require employers to post total compensation, meaning that companies can leave out information about stock grants and bonuses, offering a highly incomplete picture for some highly paid jobs.
For high-paying jobs in the technology industry, equity compensation in the form of restricted stock units can make up a large percentage of an employee’s take-home pay. In industries like finance, bonuses make up a big portion of annual pay.
“Especially for tech employees, ultimately people want to know how much they’re getting in total compensation,” said Zuhayeer Musa, co-founder of Levels.fyi, a firm focused on recruiting and coaching for technology workers. “Sometimes stock compensation can be more than 50% of your actual total comp.”
Musa said that stock from big tech companies is basically liquid because it can be immediately sold on the stock market.
The new law also allows companies to provide wide ranges for pay, sometimes ranging over $100,000 or more between the lowest salary and the highest salary for a position. That seemingly violates the spirit of the law, but companies say that the ranges are realistic because base pay can vary widely based on skills, qualifications, experience, and location.
Companies may be open to hiring candidates with a range of experience — starting from entry-level to a more senior person — for a particular opening, said Lulu Seikaly, senior corporate attorney at Payscale.
Seikaly said she recommends clients should post job listings with a specific seniority level to narrow the potential pay range.
“When we talk to customers, and they ask what do you think is a good faith range, we tell them that’s a business decision, but the way we would do it, especially from the legal side, if you post by levels, that’s going to cover you a lot more than posting one wide range,” Seikaly said.
Some California companies are not listing salaries for jobs clearly intended to be performed in other states, but advocates hope California’s new law could spark more salary disclosures around the country. After all, a job listing with an explicit starting salary or range is likely to attract more candidates than one with unclear pay.
“I was telling some folks this morning that pay transparency right now is kind of the exception,” Seikaly said. “Give it five to 10 years, I think it’ll end up being the norm.”
Global data centers dealmaking surged to hit another record high this year, driven by a rush to build out the infrastructure required for energy-intensive AI workloads.
That surge came even as investors grew increasingly wary of inflated artificial intelligence valuations and the financing underpinning the rapid expansion of data centers. Global stocks sold off in November as worries of an AI-fueled bubble persisted.
But S&P Global reported that more than $61 billion has flowed into the data center market this year, up slightly from $60.8 billion last year, amid what it called a “global construction frenzy.”
A surge in debt financing contributed to the record high as hyperscalers increasingly tap private equity markets rather than funding the expensive infrastructure themselves.
That trend has sparked concerns from some investors as they question the value of the advanced tech that data centers house.
Shares of cloud company Oracle fell 5% on Wednesday following a report that Blue Owl Capital was pulling out of a deal to back a $10 billion data center in Michigan. Oracle has denied the report, but Broadcom, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices retreated after it was published. The Nasdaq Composite lost 1.81% in its worst day in nearly a month.
Iuri Struta, TMT analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said his team expects market concerns around AI and Oracle to be temporary and unlikely to have a “massive impact” on data center buildout and M&A in the near future.
“The competitive dynamic among frontier AI model providers, like OpenAI, Alphabet and Anthropic, is changing quickly, and this can have an impact on investor sentiment in public markets. But overall, we see demand for AI applications continuing to grow strongly in 2026.”
Despite the recent pullback in AI stocks, many analysts remain bullish on the sector. ING expects secular trends to point to healthy investment levels in 2026 driven by AI advancements and growing public and private support for digital innovation.
“There are two sides to the development of AI, one that would cater for optimism such as faster development of medicine and at the same time there would be concerns typically around (public) safety,” Wim Steenbakkers, global head of datacenters and technology at ING, told CNBC.
“Hence uncertainty remains around the monetisation of the technology and business models. Questions around the high levels of investment will only be answered in the future when the uncertainties diminish and the applications of the technology and its advantages become clearer.”
There were more than 100 data center transactions in the first 11 months of the year, whose total value already exceeds all the deals done in 2024, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. The majority of those deals took place in the U.S., followed by the Asia-Pacific region.
“In Europe, the buildout of data centers is expected to grow at a lower rate than other regions, but it remains to be seen if this results in an M&A rush amid scarcity of assets,” Struta said.
The pace of growth in the U.S. is leaving Europe “in the dust” according to a recent report from ING which predicted data center investment in the U.S. could be fivefold higher. Growth is also increasingly coming from the Middle East, as the wealthy Gulf States look to position themselves as the next global AI hub.
Debt issuance nearly doubles in 2025
Debt issuance nearly doubled to $182 billion in 2025, up from $92 billion last year, according to the data from S&P. It noted that Meta and Google were among the most active issuers, with Facebook’s owner raising $62 billion in debt since 2022 — nearly half of that total was issued in 2025 alone.
Google and Amazon raised $29 billion and $15 billion, respectively, according to the report, which noted that hyperscalers are increasingly working with AI labs to buy assets to finance construction in an “unusual arrangement” that underscores the significant capital required to meet demand.
Struta expects more “robust” M&A investment activity in the data center space in 2026.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if already high valuations get even higher,” he told CNBC.
“The buildout of new data centers can be temporarily tempered by a lack of energy supply, making already built data centers more valuable. As the availability of large data center companies remains scarce, we could see more asset sales by companies that don’t view data centers as their core business.”
Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told employees on Thursday that the company’s U.S. operations will be housed in a new joint venture.
The entity is named TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, according to a memo sent by Chew and obtained by CNBC. As part of the joint venture, Chew said the company has signed agreements with the three managing investors: Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. He said that the deal’s “closing date” is Jan. 22.
Under a national security law, which the Supreme Court upheld in January, China-based ByteDance was required to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations or face an effective ban in the country. In September, President Donald Trump signed an executive order approving a proposed deal that would keep TikTok operational in the U.S. by meeting the requirements of a law originally signed by former President Joe Biden.
Chew noted that the new TikTok joint venture would be “majority owned by American investors, governed by a new seven-member majority-American board of directors, and subject to terms that protect Americans’ data and U.S. national security.”
The U.S. joint venture will be 50% held by a consortium of new investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX with 15% each. Just over 30% will be held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance, and 19.9% will be retained by ByteDance, the memo said.
The TikTok chief said the entity will be responsible for protecting U.S. data, ensuring the security of its prized algorithm, content moderation and “software assurance.” He added that the joint venture will “have the exclusive right and authority to provide assurances that content, software, and data for American users is secure.”
In addition to being an investor, Oracle will serve as the “trusted security partner” in charge of auditing and validating that it complies with “agreed upon National Security Terms,” the memo said. Sensitive U.S. data will be stored in Oracle’s U.S.-based cloud computing data centers, Chew wrote.
The new TikTok entity will also be tasked with retraining the video app’s core content recommendation algorithm “on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” the memo said.
Chew noted that TikTok global U.S. entities “will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing.”
Under Trump’s executive order in September, the attorney general was blocked from enforcing the national security law for a 120-day period in order to “permit the contemplated divestiture to be completed,” allowing the deal to finalize by Jan 23.
WATCH: TikTok signs deal for sale of U.S. unit to joint venture
The VC arms of Google and Nvidia have invested in Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable’s $330 million Series B at a $6.6 billion valuation, the company announced on Thursday.
The news confirms an earlier story from CNBC, which reported on Tuesday that Lovable had raised at that valuation, trebling its valuation from its previous round in July, and that the investors included U.S. VC firms Accel and Khosla Ventures.
CapitalG, one of Google’s VC divisions, and Menlo Ventures led the round. Alongside Accel and Khosla, Nvidia venture arm NVentures, actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s VC firm Kinship Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Databricks Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, T.Capital, Hubspot Ventures, DST Global, EQT Global, Creandum and Evantic also participated.
The fresh funds take Lovable’s total raised in 2025 to over $500 million.
“Lovable has done something rare: built a product that enterprises and founders both love,” said Laela Sturdy, managing partner at CapitalG in a statement accompanying the announcement.
“The demand we’re seeing from Fortune 500 companies signals a fundamental shift in how software gets built.”
Lovable’s platform uses AI models from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic to help users build apps and websites using text prompts, without technical knowledge of coding.
The startup reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in November, just under a year after achieving $1 million in ARR for the first time. It was founded in 2023 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin.
Vibe coding startups have seen big interest from VCs in recent times, as investors bet on their promise of drastically reducing the time it takes to create software and apps.
In the U.S., Anysphere, which created coding tool Cursor, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November. In September, Replit hit a $3 billion price tag after picking up $250 million and Vercel closed a $300 million round at a $9.3 billion valuation.
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