NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has proposed a new compensation model where engineers would receive an annual AI token budget in addition to their base salary. Speaking at the GTC AI Conference, Huang suggested this budget could be equivalent to half an engineer's salary, enabling them to deploy AI agents and amplify their productivity by up to tenfold.
This initiative reflects Huang's vision of a future workplace where human workers manage teams of AI agents to perform complex tasks. He stated that access to tokens—the units of data that measure AI system usage—is already becoming a key recruiting tool in Silicon Valley, as it allows engineers to be more productive and experimental. The proposal positions computational resources as a new pillar of employee compensation.