By Geoff Weiss,Ashley Rodriguez
Publication Date: 2026-01-30 10:00:00
Nvidia’s meteoric stock surge has done more than reward investors; it has created vast wealth for some long-standing employees.
While Nvidia’s workforce is relatively small compared to other tech giants, with just 36,000 employees as of early 2025, stock appreciation during the AI boom has turned certain ordinary contributors into millionaires, according to pay data tracked by Levels.fyi.
Nvidia president and CEO Jensen Huang takes a hands-on approach to employee compensation.
“I review everybody’s compensation up to this day at the end of every cycle,” Huang said on an episode of the “All-In” podcast in July.
Huang also said on the podcast that he’s “created more billionaires on my management team than any CEO in the world.”
Still, employees who joined Nvidia earlier are likelier to have reaped rewards than newer hires—a pay disparity that employees sometimes openly discuss.
Nvidia doesn’t disclose salary data for its workforce, though publicly available work visa filings offer one of the few empirical glimpses into how much it pays for key roles. The figures come from filings that all companies submit to the Labor Department to sponsor H-1B visas, which Huang has stressed Nvidia will continue to sponsor and cover all associated fees amid evolving policies.
The figures only reflect base pay — not the equity and bonuses that typically comprise total compensation packages.
Nvidia received…