Brookings report on AI cites three Tennessee cities
Nashville earns an Emerging Centers designation, while Chattanooga and Knoxville are classified as Focused Movers.
A new report from the Brookings Institution spotlights three Tennessee metro areas for their efforts related to artificial intelligence (AI).
Titled Mapping the AI economy: Which regions are ready for the next technological leap?, the document is divided into six categories:
- Superstars: The San Francisco and San Jose, CA, metropolitan areas exhibit unmatched strength across all three AI pillars (talent, innovation, and adoption).
- Star Hubs: This group of 28 metro areas forms a second echelon of uniformly strong AI ecosystems, balancing top‑tier talent, research, and enterprise uptake.
- Emerging Centers: This group of 14 metro areas combines top performance in two pillars with one developing area.
- Focused Movers: These 29 metro areas excel in one pillar while maintaining foundations in the other two.
- Nascent Adopters: This group of 79 metro areas shows moderate performance across all three pillars.
- Others: A group of 43 metro areas that currently lags on multiple pillars.
How did Tennessee regions perform?
- Nashville was one of four large cities in the Emerging Centers area. It was a group of 14 communities that saw 88 percent growth in their AI job postings between 2018 and 2025.
- Knoxville and Chattanooga were characterized as Focused Movers, two of 29 cities in this category. Among those, seven, including Knoxville, were described as “talent specialists, where top-tier computer science programs and large employer bases ensure talent density scores exceed the national benchmark.” The report notes that Knoxville is among six Focused Movers that have seen have seen AI job posting growth greater than 250 percent. In the case of Chattanooga, it was cited for the number of local employers seemingly adopting AI earlier than many competitors.
According to the report, “the AI Superstars in the Bay Area continue to dominate. Eleven percent of all AI hiring activity remains concentrated in just these two metro areas, as do 14 percent of AI worker
profiles, 34 percent of AI patents, and about one-third of AI start-ups. Add in the presence of the
headquarters of AI titans such as Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia, and the staying power of the Superstar cluster remains hard to question. With that said, the broader map depicts both welcome decentralization as well as too many areas that lack significant AI activity.”
The flip side is also troubling, with more than 200 of the nation’s other metro areas—the majority of them—lacking a significant AI presence.
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