By Ray Brennan
Publication Date: 2026-05-31 07:00:00
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is pushing back on one of Silicon Valley’s favorite AI talking points: that artificial intelligence is already rendering huge numbers of workers obsolete.
In a recent interview with Channel NewsAsia, cited by Futurism, Huang said too many executives are using AI as a convenient excuse for layoffs — and scaring people in the process.
What happened?
Speaking to Channel NewsAsia, Huang criticized business leaders who have blamed job cuts on AI, arguing that the timeline simply does not add up. If AI only recently became genuinely useful at scale, he said, then it is hard to explain layoffs from years earlier as being caused by the technology.
Huang called that narrative “too lazy” and suggested that other factors are more likely to be behind the cuts, including over-hiring and the enormous cost of building AI in the first place. Advanced AI systems require massive investments in cloud computing.
His comments follow several high-profile rounds of layoffs that were framed as AI-related. Earlier this year, Block CEO Jack Dorsey outlined plans to cut the company’s workforce by almost half while pointing to “intelligence tools” speeding up change. Former staffers, however, said the bigger problem was over-hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Huang is not alone in questioning that explanation. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis recently faulted leadership at other firms for pinning layoffs on AI and said…
