Nvidia has confirmed a recent report from the New Indian Express (TNIE) to Barrons, admitting that it has slowed the pace of its hiring activity. The original reporting was based on leaked internal Nvidia communications.
Nvidia told Barrons that its slowed personnel acquisition activities are largely due to the macroeconomic climate, with widespread signs of climbing inflation. In other words, the impression the reports are giving is that this isn't an Nvidia-specific issue, though this story is Nvidia-specific in its detail. Other big tech companies might follow a similar path soon, but we haven't seen any evidence of a wider industry hiring slowdown yet.
TNIE saw an Nvidia Slack message about the hiring pause. "Leadership wants to take a pause to onboard the thousands of new hires we’ve recently made," said the message. Some further guidelines were shared, asking managers to raise standards for ongoing hiring activity, and not hire more than 10% of people who get to the interview stages. However, Nvidia is keen to push on with its diversity hiring, and guidance for such candidates is to "proceed as usual."
The last time we wrote about Nvidia's hiring activity was back in January when we heard that it was striving to fill "hundreds" of vacancies. The bulk of the vacancies in that report were at Nvidia Israel locations, with the founding of a new design and engineering group for CPUs being a major driving force behind the hiring activity. This CPU Team hiring news came just a few days ahead of the collapse of the Nvidia-Arm deal. Perhaps the CPU team was formed knowing that the deal was not going to happen — it is hard to know. On the other side of the deal, we know Arm froze hiring last year in anticipation of a buyout from Nvidia.
We don't see any other stories of hiring pauses or freezes in the tech industry at this time. In fact, AMD is busy hiring for next-gen SoCs for consoles and GPUs. Reports suggest TSMC can't hire enough people to staff its Arizona facilities. Moreover, Intel was so desperate to use the graphics IP and software services talent of Siru Innovations that it bought the company (three weeks ago).
We know that rising inflation and pressure on consumer spending is real, but we haven't seen any of Nvidia's rivals put the brakes on yet.
