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.”

“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.