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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is introducing a novel recruitment perk: tokens.
During his two-hour keynote at the GPU Technology Conference on Monday, Huang envisioned a future where every engineer receives an annual token budget, which he is prepared to provide.
"They're going to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, their base pay," Huang said of engineers. "I'm going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10X. Of course, we would."
He added, "It is now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley: How many tokens come along with my job? The reason is very clear, because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive."
Tokens are small units of text that AI reads or writes, roughly the size of part of a word. AI companies use tokens as an economic unit to measure computing work done by AI. Longer text requires more tokens, so pricing is often based on cost per thousand or million tokens.
Huang is among the first high-profile CEOs to publicly discuss a company token budget. His remarks came during a developer-focused keynote, where he predicted purchase orders between Nvidia's Blackwell and Vera Rubin GPUs would reach $1 trillion through 2027 due to their token generation capabilities.
Business Insider's Alistair Barr previously reported that Silicon Valley is exploring new ways to compete for talent beyond salary, bonuses, and equity by offering AI inference power. Investors now view tokens as a "fourth component" in recruitment, with some suggesting companies should clearly list token budgets in job postings.
Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead at OpenAI's Codex AI coding service, recently noted on X that AI compute is becoming scarcer and more valuable. "I am increasingly asked during candidate interviews how much dedicated inference compute they will have to build with Codex," he wrote.
