Jensen Huang floats giving engineers tokens worth half their annual salary on top of pay as a recruiting strategy

• Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was one of the first CEOs to introduce tokens as a hiring strategy.

• Huang said engineers will soon ask “how many coins will come with my job?”

• Huang said Nvidia engineers will be able to receive tokens worth half their annual salary in addition to the base salary.

Nvidia CEO offers a new perk to attract talent: tokens.

in conversation GPU Technology Conference On Monday, Jensen Huang said in his two-hour keynote that he can see a future where every engineer will need an annual token budget and is willing to provide it.

“They’ll make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, which is their base salary,” said Huang, one of the engineers. “I’ll probably give them half of that in tokens as well, so they can be multiplied by 10. Of course we would.”

“Now one of these recruitment tools In Silicon Valley: How many tokens come with my job?” Huang added: “And it’s obvious why, because every engineer with access to tokens will be more productive.”

Tokens refer to a small piece of text, usually about the size of a word, that the AI ​​reads or writes. AI companies use tokens as a tool economic unit To measure how much computational work the AI ​​is doing. The longer your text, the more coins it requires to process; so pricing is usually based on cost per thousand or million coins.

Huang became one of the first high-profile CEOs to publicly address the issue of the company’s token budget. He made his comments in a keynote address aimed primarily at developers; He said purchase orders between Blackwell and Vera Rubin will reach $1 trillion by 2027 due to their ability to produce more tokens.

Business Insider’s Alistair Barr previously reported that Silicon Valley is finding new ways to compete for talent alongside traditional salary, bonuses and equity. Artificial intelligence inference power. Investors are now considering tokens as a “fourth ingredient” in hiring, Barr wrote, and some told Barr they believe a company should clearly list its token budget in hiring disclosures.

Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead at OpenAI’s Codex, an AI coding service, recently wrote that AI computing in X is becoming increasingly rare and valuable.

“I am increasingly asked during candidate interviews how much custom inference calculations they should build with Codex,” Sottiaux wrote.

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