SAN JOSE — During his keynote speech at Nvidia's GTC 2026 in San Jose, Jensen Huang proposed that AI tokens be included as part of engineers' compensation packages.

"It is now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley: How many tokens comes along with my job?" said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during his keynote at Nvidia's GTC 2026 in San Jose. "And the reason for that is very clear, because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive," Huang said during the same keynote.

Tokens are the language of artificial intelligence. Large language models break down words and other inputs into numerical tokens to make them easier to process. Each token is roughly three-quarters of a word.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, called artificial intelligence data centers "token factories." Artificial intelligence model providers charge for services based on the number of tokens used and generated.

"Fundamentally, our business and I think the business of every other model provider is going to look like selling tokens," said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, during the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in Washington, D.C. "I wonder if the future looks something more like Universal Basic Compute than Universal Basic Income, and everybody gets a slice of GPT-7's compute and they can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research, but what you get is not dollars but this like slice, you own part of the productivity," Altman said during a May 2024 episode of the All-In podcast.

Sam Altman's vision for AI tokens relies on a successful buildout of massive artificial intelligence data centers. Depending on the complexity of tasks and the terms of enterprise agreements, workers can rapidly increase their companies' artificial intelligence bills. "We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness, across all sectors, small and large," said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

An analysis showed that Nvidia is the world leader in token costs. Chamath Palihapitiya founded 8090 with the goal of replacing or rewriting all legacy software in the world.