Jensen Huang’s comments at Computex defend the Samsung bonus structure that delivers $400,000 to chip engineers, but land alongside an $80bn Nvidia buyback announced two weeks ago.
Jensen Huang, the Nvidia chief executive, told reporters on the sidelines of Computex in Taipei on Tuesday that workers should be paid “as much as possible,” framing the principle as the response to a question about Samsung Electronics’ new bonus structure that delivers as much as $400,000 to memory chip engineers.
“I pay my employees as much as I can,” Jensen Huang said, before adding, “but it doesn’t make this right,” in an unusual public hedging from a CEO who almost never qualifies his own positions in real time.
The Samsung context is the trigger for the question. The Korean memory firm’s union and management reached a deal earlier this month, after a near-strike that survived an injunction filing from a smaller non-chip union, that allocates 10.5% of semiconductor operating profit to chip-division bonuses, with payouts of up to 600 million won (about $400,000) per memory-division worker contingent on sustained profit targets through 2035.
The arrangement was described in Reuters analysis as the largest single profit-share commitment in major Korean corporate history. Samsung supplies HBM4 to Nvidia for the Vera Rubin platform, which made the question to Huang structurally relevant rather than merely topical.
