Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a message for the company’s engineers. According to the 63-year-old chief executive of the US-based chipmaker Nvidia, engineers who do not make extensive use of AI tools are not productive. This highlights how central token-based computing has become to the company’s workflow. Speaking on the All-In Podcast during Nvidia GTC 2026, Huang indicated that Nvidia is willing to spend heavily on AI tokens to support its engineering teams.Huang said he would be concerned if a highly paid engineer was not using a significant amount of tokens to complete their work. He said, “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. 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.”He compared avoiding AI tools to rejecting standard industry software, saying it would be like a chip designer choosing paper and pencil over modern computer-aided design tools.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang compares AI tools to industrial revolution machinery
Huang compared modern AI tools to machinery introduced during the Industrial Revolution, which enabled workers to handle tasks that were previously too heavy, large, or time-consuming. He suggested that AI can now play a similar role for mental work, allowing engineers to shift their focus toward creative tasks. “It’s just a new way of doing computer programming. In the past, we code. In the future, we’re going to write ideas, architectures, specifications. I think that every engineer is going to have a hundred agents,” Huang explained.The approach is not limited to Nvidia. According to Business Insider, several tech companies are beginning to include access to AI computing power as part of compensation packages, with the idea that providing employees with ample AI tokens could significantly increase productivity.However, the use of AI in corporate environments has raised concerns. Reports indicate that more than half of CEOs have not yet observed clear benefits from AI adoption, with only about 12% reporting higher revenue and lower costs. There have also been instances of AI-related disruptions, including issues at Amazon Web Services, where engineers were called to review problems linked to “Gen-AI assisted changes” that had “high blast radius.” Meanwhile, Microsoft has said it will address ongoing issues with Windows 11, months after its CEO disclosed that AI generates a portion of the company’s code.
