Jensen Huang says Nvidia engineers should use AI tokens worth half their annual salary every year to be fully productive — compares not using AI to using paper and pencil for designing chips

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that he’ll be deeply alarmed if an engineer getting paid $500,000 a year does not consume at $250,000 worth of AI tokens to get their job done. The leather-clad chief of the world’s most valuable AI company said this during an episode of the All-In Podcast shot on the last day of Nvidia GTC 2026, after one of the hosts asked Huang if he’s spending around $2 billion a year on tokens for the Nvidia engineering team, with Jensen answering, “We’re trying to.”

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“Let me give you a thought experiment. Let’s say you have a software engineer or AI researcher, and you pay them $500,000 a year,” the Nvidia CEO said. He also added, “At the end of the year, I’m going to ask him how much did you spend in tokens. And [if] that person said $5,000, I will go ape something else. If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed.” Huang went on to compare an employee not using AI tokens to a chip designer saying that they will use paper and pencil and eschew CAD tools to get their work done.

Jensen compared today’s AI tools to machinery that was invented during the industrial revolution, which allowed workers to physically do things that, in the past, were either too heavy, too big, or took too long. Now, it seems that the Nvidia CEO wants to use AI for mental tasks so that Nvidia engineers can focus on creativity. “It’s just a new way of doing computer programming. In the past, we code. In the future, we’re going to write ideas, architectures, specifications,” Huang said. “I think that every engineer is going to have a hundred agents.”

It seems that the Nvidia CEO isn’t the only one investing in AI tokens for his employees to freely use. According to Business Insider, many tech companies are now starting to offer guaranteed access to AI inference power as part of the remuneration package to candidates. That thought is that by giving people generous amounts of AI tokens, they’d be able to amplify their productivity by as much as 10 times or more.

However, using AI in the corporate setting is not without its issues. There have been reports that more than half of CEOs have yet to see clear benefits from AI deployments, with only about 12% getting higher revenues and reduces costs. We’ve also seen several AI-related outages with Amazon Web Services, with one report saying that Amazon has called its engineers for a meeting to discuss issues created by “Gen-AI assisted changes” that had “high blast radius.” And although Microsoft did not say anything about AI, it promised to fix Windows 11’s most annoying flaws to restore its reputation several months after its CEO revealed that AI writes up to 30% of Microsoft’s code.

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