Nvidia chief Huang given 60% pay increase amid AI hysteria

After a smashing fiscal '24, we're surprised he didn't get more

Nvidia's chief Jenson Huang received a 60 percent pay bump in the corporation's fiscal 2024 on the back of a massive rally in the share price based on demand for AI, and triple digit growth percentages for revenue and operating profit.

Huang's package swelled to $34.16 million versus $21.35 million in the prior year. This was comprised of an unchanged base salary of $996,515, stock awards of $26.67 million, non-equity incentive compensation of $4 million and all other compensation of $2.494 million.

For someone who is reportedly worth $81.7 billion, at least according to Forbes, the financial top-up from Nvidia's last fiscal year likely barely registered in Huang's bank account. He owns 3.79 percent of the chipmaker's total share base.

Is he worth that sort of payout? Huang helped to position the company for the AI wave of demand (more than 40,000 companies use Nvidia GPUs for AI, claims Nvidia) and presided over some mightily impressive growth figures at Nvidia.

Revenue for the financial year ended January 28, 2024, jumped 126 percent year-on-year to $60.9 billion and operating income was up almost seven times to $33 billion.

Looking in more granular detail, the Compute and Networking division reported revenue of $47.4 billion, up 215 percent; Graphics was up 28 percent to $13.5 billion. The company's share price has bounced by 95 percent in the year to date to give it a market capitalization of $2.3 trillion.

The exec pay figures were outlined in a Notice of 2024 Annual Meeting of Shareholders document filed with the SEC, and the compensation packages for Nvidia's senior leaders are among the items of business that shareholders will be asked to vote for on June 26.

Sales of Nvidia's Data Center products alone brought in $47.5 billion in revenue, up 217 percent; Gaming captured $10.4 billion, up 15 percent; Professional Visualization was $1.6 billion, up one percent; and Automotive was $1.1 billion, up 21 percent.

Product highlights in the year included shipments of the first Arm-based datacenter GPU, Grace, as part of the GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, and "ramping" Grace products into a new multi-billion dollar line. The Blackwell GPU architecture also debuted, as did the Spectrum X accelerated networking platform and Quantum-X800 InfiniBand, and Spectrum-X800 Ethernet switches.

CFO Colette Kress received a financial package of $13.26 million, up from $10.2 million in the prior year; exec veep for worldwide field ops Ajay Puri got $13.6 million versus $10.6 million; and Debora Shoquist, exec vice president of operations, got $11.05 million compared to last year's $9.1 million.

There's a lot of gold in training them AI models. Lets just hope the bubble doesn't burst, eh readers? ®

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