Nvidia's Jensen Huang pitches tokens as recruitment strategy

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang proposed using tokens as a hiring perk during his two-hour keynote at the GPU Technology Conference. He said engineers will soon be asking "how many tokens comes along with my job?" and suggested giving them tokens worth about half their base pay "so that they could be amplified 10X.

Of course, we would." Huang said every engineer might need an annual token budget. Tokens are a unit of text that AI reads or writes, roughly the size of part of a word. AI companies use tokens to measure how much computing work the AI does, and pricing is often based on cost per thousand or million tokens because longer text requires more tokens to process.

Huang became one of the first high-profile CEOs to address a company token budget publicly, saying purchase orders between Blackwell and Vera Rubin would reach $1 trillion through 2027 because of their ability to generate more tokens.

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