Jensen Huang says he pays Nvidia staff ‘as much as possible’ in bid to share the wealth from AI boom

Jensen Huang has done pretty well out of the AI boom: As the CEO of Nvidia, he now sits on a net worth of approximately $186 billion, and has made multiple members of his board billionaires by association.

It’s a trend Huang seems keen to continue: Sharing the enormous wealth that is being generated by the potential of artificial intelligence, with Nvidia positioned as a key part of the engine, while keeping staff motivated.

Speaking in Taipei on Tuesday morning, Huang told a gaggle of reporters his aim was to pay Nvidia staff as much as he could afford to. When asked about how the distribution of wealth created by AI should be handled, Huang said: “I think people should be paid as much as possible.”

At the Computex trade show, he added: “I pay my employees as much as I can … That’s what I do, doesn’t make this right,” per Bloomberg.

It comes after Samsung Electronics’ chip-making division came to a landmark compensation package: Following strike threats, union members voted in favor of a deal that would award eligible workers with a bonus of approximately $340,000 each.

The eye-watering sums beg the question of dependency: How much leverage do skilled workers have over their employers, either in terms of moving to rival brands or to strike and stop working at all?

In the case of Nvidia, Huang is known to demand perfection but pays his staff handsomely for their work. Last year Fortune reported that two of Nvidia’s C-Suite had become billionaires thanks to the soaring stock of the chipmaker (up 63% over the past year). Nvidia’s CFO Colette Kress and its executive vice president of world field operations, Jay Puri, tipped over the 10-digit mark in July 2025, per calculations by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Around that time, Huang addressed the wealth creation his team was experiencing, telling a panel hosted by venture capitalists running the All-In podcast: “I’ve created more billionaires on my management team than any CEO in the world. They’re doing just fine.” He added: “Don’t feel sad for anybody at my layer. My layer is doing just fine.”

The Stanford alum takes compensation matters so seriously that he signs off on every single pay packet in the company.

He added on the panel last year: “I review everybody’s compensation up to this day. I sort through all 42,000 employees, and 100% of the time, I increase the company’s spend on [operating expenses]. And the reason for that is because you take care of people, everything else takes care of itself.”

AI and the wealth divide

While Huang may be doing his best to share Nvidia’s profits with its employees, the much wider picture begs the question of how massive investments into AI might reinforce existing wealth inequality.

It’s a question Larrk Fink, CEO of BlackRock, sought to address in his 2026 chairman’s letter. Fink mused: “The old model of global capitalism is fracturing. Countries are spending enormous sums to become self-reliant—in energy, in defense, in technology. Meanwhile, the vast majority of wealth has flowed to people who owned assets, not to people who earned most of their money by working.”

He added: “AI threatens to repeat that pattern at an even larger scale—concentrating wealth among the companies and investors positioned to capture it. This is where much of today’s economic anxiety comes from: a deeper feeling that capitalism is working—just not for enough people.”

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