It’s a summer day in Santa Clara, California, and a gaggle of luxury cars — Porsches, Corvettes, Lamborghinis — are occupying parking spots where lesser models used to be. Some of the cars are newly painted lime green with Nvidia Corp. logos. And they’re stuck where their owners want to be: at the office.
Nvidia’s stock has surged 3,776% since the start of 2019 as the company has profited from selling key chips needed for artificial intelligence work, making many new millionaires in the process. But current and former employees said the work hours are equally grueling and stressful, leaving little time for the jet-setting, home-buying and fun that many can now afford. A culture problem is brewing, said 10 people, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.
The 31-year-old chipmaker has grown its market capitalization faster than any other company in history. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has a chaotic structure where one manager can have dozens of direct reporters, current and former employees said. Rather than firing staff like his competitors, Huang said he prefers to “torture them to make them great.”
One former employee, who worked in tech support for enterprise clients, said she was required to work seven days a week, often until 1 or 2 a.m. She said many of her former colleagues, especially those on engineering teams, worked long hours. She described the environment as a pressure cooker, with many company meetings turning into shouting matches — but said the pay package made it difficult for her to leave. She quit in May and requested anonymity to speak candidly about the company.
Another woman, who worked in marketing until 2022 and requested anonymity to protect her career, said she often attended 7 to 10 meetings a day, each attended by more than 30 people, with frequent fighting and yelling incidents. But she said she tolerated it for two years, because she was offered “golden handcuffs” – the opportunity to earn even more money.
Nvidia declined to comment.
Nvidia hasn’t had trouble retaining its employees in recent years, partly because its stock grants typically vest — or are available — over a four-year period, giving employees an incentive to stay to earn their full pay package. In 2023, 5.3% of employees left the company, but after its valuation surpassed $1 trillion, that same turnover rate dropped by nearly half, to 2.7%, according to its 2024 sustainability report. The semiconductor industry overall has a much higher turnover rate at 17.7%, according to Nvidia.
The trend of “relaxing and vesting” is so common in the tech industry that Hollywood mocked it in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” show, in which a character spends his time playing video games and drinking large sodas while waiting for his stock to vest. But that doesn’t work at Nvidia. It would be embarrassing and also difficult socially, one current employee said.
Those who have tried to do so have become the subject of internal criticism. During a staff meeting late last year, employees complained to Huang that some of their colleagues were in “semi-retirement” mode, according to a former employee who attended the meeting.
According to a former engineering employee who left the company in June, those who have been with the company for about a decade will have more than enough money to retire. Many don’t, however, because there are millions more waiting for the next stock grant, the person said.
The explosive stock rally also means many Nvidia employees are making more money than their peers at other chipmakers. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress, who joined the company 11 years ago, owns shares worth about $758.7 million. Dave Zinsner, her counterpart at Intel Corp., who has a higher pay package but shorter tenure, owns shares worth just $3.13 million. At Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Nvidia’s closest rival, which has also seen rapid share growth, CFO Gene Hu, who joins in 2023, owns shares worth $6.43 million.
The former engineering employee, who asked not to be named, said that during 2023 and 2024, working at Nvidia meant facing frequent expressions of wealth among employees of nearly all seniority levels. He said he regularly saw co-workers surfing Zillow and alluding to new vacation homes in casual conversation. He said it has become common for employees to attend big-ticket sporting events such as the Super Bowl and the NBA Finals.
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“It’s always pretty amazing how much money they have in one stock,” said Spencer Hsu, a real estate agent based in Palo Alto, California, who has worked with many Nvidia employees this year — on nights and weekends, of course. Clients are putting down payments of 40% to 60% on multimillion-dollar homes.
According to several recently retired employees, conversations about Nvidia’s daily market gains or losses (but usually profits) can be heard in hushed tones at lunchtime. One current Nvidia product manager said thousands of employees are on a company Slack channel dedicated to exchanging personal finance advice. This group is for employees who kept their vested shares – not the many others who sold their stock long before the peak.
It’s not just about the money. Airan Jr., who worked at the chipmaker from 2020 to 2023, said “working at Nvidia is like Disneyland” because of the many teams solving interesting technical problems. He worked on a sales team based in Brazil and said the company’s culture, though unconventional, contributed to its great success. Nvidia now accounts for more than 90 percent of sales in the AI chip market.
Huang, who has 60 direct reporters, has no time for bureaucracy, elaborate PowerPoint presentations or face-to-face meetings. He involves himself in minor decisions, such as selecting photos for a marketing campaign. Huang is known to send Nvidia employees a regular email to a centralized email address with a bulleted list of five things he is working on. Huang sometimes responds directly to these emails to ask for more details or give instructions.
Huang has said his approach to leadership was shaped by facing “real adversity” while running Nvidia for more than three decades. He tells employees he’s pushing them to do their life’s work. “This is the way it should be,” Huang said of his demanding management style in a recent 60 Minutes interview. “If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.”
Most employees like Huang’s unusual leadership style. His approval rating on Glassdoor is 97%, higher than his peers at Alphabet Inc. (94%), Apple Inc. (87%), Meta Platform Inc. (66%) and Amazon.com Inc. (54%).
But the former marketing employee warned that Huang’s flat corporate structure sometimes works differently than intended. She said that in her experience, because of the company’s structure, people are encouraged to fight for Huang’s attention rather than work together for Nvidia’s long-term success. The same structure applies to people far below Huang as well — the former tech support employee said her supervisor has more than 100 people reporting directly to him. At a certain point, with a certain amount of stress, the stress starts to lose its appeal.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)