Jensen Huang highlighted the immense productivity value of AI in early 2026, stating that if a $500,000 engineer isn’t consuming at least $250,000 worth of tokens per year, he would be “deeply alarmed”. He considers heavy token usage essential for AI-driven engineering and compares not using AI to using paper and pencil for design. Here is the quote:

“If your $500K engineer isn’t burning $250K in tokens, something is wrong.” — [Jensen Huang].

At a developer conference in 2023, Jensen Huang — the Taiwanese-American CEO of Nvidia, the man who turned a graphics chip company into the backbone of the entire AI revolution, the man whose net worth went from $3 billion to $100 billion in five years — said this:

“The more tokens you process, the smarter you get.”

He was talking about large language models. The idea is simple at the technical level: AI systems improve by processing more tokens — units of text, of language, of information. The more a model is exposed to, the more patterns it…