Pay workers ‘as much as possible’, says Nvidia’s Huang

TAIPEI: Companies should pay workers “as much as possible”, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang said Tuesday ahead of a trip to South Korea, where Samsung Electronics recently averted a strike by making an agreement on bonuses with its union.

Huang, head of the US artificial intelligence hardware giant that is the world’s most valuable company, was asked about the Samsung dispute at a news conference in Taipei, where a major tech show is taking place this week.

“I’m not an expert in that area,” he said. “I think people should be paid as much as possible. Ask my employees – literally, I do that.”

“I pay my employees as much as I can,” he added. “But that’s just what I do. It doesn’t make this right.”

The AI boom has driven Nvidia’s stock price up more than 1,170% over the past five years, making many employees holding stock options millionaires practically overnight.

Samsung, which makes memory chips essential for AI data centres, has also seen its value and profits soar as global demand skyrockets.

That has fuelled frustration among staff, and under the union deal around 60% of Samsung’s domestic workforce is eligible to receive a bonus of roughly US$330,000 this year, based on a market estimate of operating profit.

Huang is due to arrive in South Korea on Friday and will reportedly meet with companies including SK Group and Hyundai to discuss robotics and so-called “physical AI”.

He will also appear on one of the country’s most popular TV talk shows, “You Quiz on the Block”, and is expected to feast on Korean barbecue with the leaders of the country’s top tech firms.

On Monday, before the start of Taiwan’s Computex expo, Nvidia unveiled a powerful laptop chip for Windows machines, staking its claim in the market for next-generation PCs integrated with AI tech.

The move challenges the likes of Apple, AMD and Intel – whose CEO Lip-Bu Tan is due to speak Tuesday at Computex – in the consumer PC domain.

Huang said Tuesday that Nvidia is “supply constrained” although “we have enough supply for very robust growth”, referring to the gamut of materials used to make computer chips, from silicon wafers to advanced memory components.

Taiwan is home to hardware production giants TSMC and Foxconn, and last week Huang said Nvidia would increase investment there to US$150 billion a year, up from US$100 billion, to “fuel an incredible ecosystem here”.

Opening Computex on Tuesday, Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-te said that rising international investment reflects the island’s “technological strength, industrial efficiency, and the trust built up in our democratic system”.

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