This week, a topic that has been boomeranging around Silicon Valley bounced into the spotlight: AI tokens as compensation. The idea is straightforward enough — rather than giving engineers only salary, equity, and bonuses, companies would also hand them a budget of AI tokens, the computational units that power tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Spend them to run agents, automate tasks, crank through code. The pitch is that access to more compute makes engineers more productive, and that more productive engineers are worth more. It’s an investment in the person holding them, is the idea.
Jensen Huang, the leather-jacket-wearing CEO of Nvidia, seemed to capture everyone’s imagination when he floated the notion at the company’s annual GTC event earlier this week that engineers should receive roughly half their base salary again — in tokens. His top people, by his math, might burn through $250,000 a year in AI compute. He called it a recruiting tool and predicted it would become standard across Silicon Valley.
