By Anniek Bao
Publication Date: 2026-03-20 07:57:00
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote address at the GTC AI Conference in San Jose, California, on March 18, 2025.
Josh Edelson | Afp | Getty Images
The perks of working in Silicon Valley have long included high salaries. Now, some engineers may be offered a new incentive: artificial intelligence tokens.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday floated a novel compensation model that would give engineers a token budget on top of their base salary, effectively paying them to deploy AI agents as productivity multipliers.
Tokens, or units of data used by AI systems, can be spent to run tools and automate tasks and are becoming “one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley,” Huang said.
“[Engineers] are going to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, their base pay,” Huang said at the chipmaker’s annual GPU Technology Conference.
“I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of [their base pay] as tokens … because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive.”
The pitch signaled Huang’s broader vision of the workplace, in which engineers oversee a fleet of AI agents capable of completing complex, multi-step tasks autonomously with minimal user input.
It is a vision that Huang has been building toward publicly. Last month, he told CNBC that Nvidia‘s employees would one day work alongside hundreds of thousands of AI agents.
“I have 42,000 biological employees, and I’m going to have hundreds of thousands of digital employees,” he said.
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