Nvidia CEO pay falls ten percent in FY23 on missed sales targets

He still gets paid 94 times what his median workers do

It sucks to be Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia's president and CEO, who could have made almost 25 million greenbacks in the latest financial year, but because of missed financial targets had to settle for a bit less.

The GPU-maker's co-founder and named executive officer (NECO) was still well rewarded for fiscal 2023 ended January 29, with a total compensation package of $21.356 million. Yet this was millions of dollars lower than the maximum that was achievable, and down ten percent on the prior year.

The financial pot Huang realized included a base salary of $996,216, stock awards of $19.666 million, and $693,710 in other compensation (security, life insurance, travel and more). Nvidia says the big boss didn't get the full payout due to results falling short of goals.

Revenue for the 12 months was flat year-on-year at $26.974 billion and net income was $4.368 billion, compared to $9.75 billion the year before. Nvidia wasn't alone in an industry coming to terms with post-pandemic demand that is being tested by rising inflation and other challenging factors.

The pay data was included in a proxy statement [PDF] disclosed by Nvidia this week.

"Fiscal 2023 was a challenging year, with macroeconomic headwinds, channel inventory corrections, COVID-19 and product architecture transitions affecting several of our businesses. As a result, our Fiscal 2023 revenue and non-GAAP Operating Income performance fell short of the CC's (compensation committee's) pre-established goals for executive compensation."

Nvidia's Ampere successor, Hopper, was announced at GTC 2022 and released to customers in autumn. It powers the HPC and AI-focused processors made by the company.

So how did the other execs at Nvidia fare? They also made less than they could have: CFO Colette Kress was awarded $10.91 million but target pay was $11.99 million, and Away Puri, veep of Worldwide Operations, received $10.62 million versus a possible $11.99 million.

As for the wider workforce, the median employee's compensation was $229,078 – which gives a CEO to median staffer pay ratio of 94:1.

Nvidia is urging all shareholders to vote to approve the 2023 executive compensation, and promising it sees better times ahead. "As we move into fiscal 2024, we expect new product architectures to ramp, alongside new opportunities from areas such as generative AI and language models, Nvidia cloud services and digitalization." ®