Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang explains why he reviews salaries of all 42,000 employees instead of HR

Nvidia CEO Jensen

In most companies, salary reviews are handled quietly by the human resources department.
At Nvidia, things work very differently. CEO Jensen Huang personally reviews the pay of every single employee, all 42,000 of them.

At the end of each review cycle, Huang looks over the compensation data himself. He uses machine learning tools to sort through the huge amount of information quickly, but the final decision is always his. His reason is straightforward: take care of your people first, and everything else will fall into place.

This approach hasn’t been cheap. Nvidia’s operating expenses have doubled, but Huang sees it as money well spent. And the results seem to back him up — Nvidia is now worth around $4 trillion and is one of the biggest winners in the global artificial intelligence boom.

The company’s meteoric rise has made waves at the top. Three Nvidia board members have become billionaires, and Huang himself joined Forbes’ list of the world’s 10 richest people last year. But he’s quick to point out that this isn’t just about rewarding executives. His aim is to create fairness, motivation, and a sense of belonging at every level of the company.

Huang also believes in keeping teams small but powerful. He says a group of about 150 skilled researchers, with the right funding, can achieve game-changing breakthroughs. This belief has guided Nvidia’s partnerships and acquisitions — including collaborations with AI leaders like OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek, both of which started with modest-sized teams that went on to do big things.

The strategy has paid off. Over the past year, Nvidia posted an operating margin of nearly 60 percent, a sign of both its efficiency and its dominance in the AI chip market. With demand for AI services and infrastructure soaring, the company’s future looks brighter than ever.

For Huang, though, it always comes back to one thing: people. By making sure every employee feels valued and fairly rewarded, he believes Nvidia can stay at the front of the pack in the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence.

It’s a rare approach for a tech giant — and one that shows sometimes the best investment a company can make isn’t just in technology, but in the people who build it.