Here’s a number that should make every CFO pause: at Nvidia’s applied deep learning division, the cost of running computers now exceeds the cost of paying the humans who operate them.
Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia’s vice president of applied deep learning, made the revelation in an Axios interview on April 26, 2026. His team’s compute expenses, spanning GPUs, electricity, and cloud infrastructure, have officially overtaken what the company spends on salaries for the same group.
The 23% problem
A 2024 study from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) found that AI automation is economically viable in only 23% of jobs focused on vision tasks. That means in 77% of those roles, human labor is still the cheaper option.
When your compute bill rivals your payroll
