NVIDIA's Huang Suggests Including AI Tokens in Engineer Salaries

According to Business Insider, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang proposed during his GTC 2026 keynote that AI tokens—the fundamental billing unit for large language models processing text—should be incorporated into engineers’ compensation packages. He noted that Silicon Valley now considers “how many token allocations come with the job” as a key factor in hiring negotiations and believes engineers with token allocations will see significantly higher productivity. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has an even broader vision. In a May 2024 episode of the All-In podcast, he suggested that a “Universal Basic Compute” model could emerge in the future, granting every citizen a quota of GPT-7 computing power to use, sell, or donate for purposes such as cancer research. Altman also stated this month at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit that AI model providers’ core business will shift toward “selling tokens,” much like utilities such as water and electricity. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned, however, that if large-scale token production does not demonstrably improve efficiency in healthcare, education, and public services, society will struggle to sustainably tolerate the massive energy consumption of AI data centers.