Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang got his first major salary bump since 2015.
A regulatory filing from Nvidia Thursday showed the AI chipmaker increased Huang’s base salary by roughly 50% to $1.49 million in the 2025 fiscal year ended Jan. 26. (To be sure, the actual amount Huang received for the year was much higher— $344 million — due to Nvidia’s soaring stock price.)
“The CC [Compensation Committee of the Board of Directors] raised Mr. Huang’s total target pay by $7 million to align more closely with the median of peer company CEOs,” the company said in its SEC filing Thursday. The company wrote that Huang’s new salary “aligned with the 75th percentile of peers.”
“The CC believed this was appropriate in consideration of internal pay equity with the base salaries of other NEOs [named executive officers, or top-paid executives whose compensation must be publicly disclosed] and as it represented Mr. Huang’s first base salary increase in 10 years.”
Huang’s new salary more closely matches up with those of fellow chipmaker executives Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom (AVGO), and Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
The last time the CEO’s salary jumped in the double digits was in 2015, when it rose 19% to over $998,000.
Salary can be just a small part of compensation for high-level tech executives, though. While Huang had a lower base pay than Microsoft’s (MSFT) Satya Nadella and Apple’s (AAPL) Tim Cook in fiscal year 2024, the latest year of data available for all three executives, he out-earned them in terms of the full package. Huang’s actual compensation was $234 million that year. Nadella and Cook received $171 million and $169 million, respectively.
While Huang had earned more than those CEOs, his compensation was far below that of rival Broadcom’s CEO Hock Tan, who made over $1 billion in 2024.
Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft have taken turns as the world’s most valuable company.
Nvidia’s market cap has taken a hit in 2025 due to the leading chip stock’s 15% decline this year. Its still-massive $2.78 trillion value is behind Apple’s roughly $3.1 trillion and Microsoft’s $3.25 trillion.
Nvidia stock is still up more than 1,500% over the past five years.
Laura Bratton is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X @LauraBratton5.
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