And he’s already preparing for that reality with an unusual incentive to attract top talent and wring more computing power from his workforce: offering engineers AI tokens worth nearly half their salary.
“We are completely resetting and starting the largest buildout of human history,” Huang said. “Most of the world’s industries building AI factories, building chip plants, building computer plants are represented here today.”
The company’s recent earnings reports have added credibility to Huang’s claims. Last month, Nvidia posted $215.9 billion in revenue for fiscal 2026, up 65% from a year ago, the highest annual result ever. Data center revenue alone rose 75% from a year ago, reaching $62.3 billion.
As business leaders aim to harness AI to boost worker productivity, Huang offered a glimpse at how Nvidia plans to operationalize that ambition: paying engineers in tokens—the currency of AI—to amplify their output.
“I could totally imagine in the future every single engineer in our company will need an annual token budget,” he said. “They’re going to make a few 100,000 a year as their base pay. I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10 times.”
At the allowance levels Huang described, engineers would have access to billions of tokens annually, unleashing a torrent of compute power. In Huang’s scenario, tokens would be an added employment perk for engineers at his firm, arming them with the power needed to conduct deep research for the company.
The Nvidia CEO said other tech firms will quickly follow suit and use tokens as a recruiting tool to attract top industry talent.
“It is now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley: how many tokens come along with my job,” he said. “The reason for that is very clear because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive.”
