Nvidia workforce data explains its meteoric rise

• Nvidia's workforce has grown nearly 20-fold since 2003.
• The company's stock price surge and low turnover have enriched many long-term employees.
• Nvidia's median salary now surpasses Microsoft's and other Silicon Valley peers.

Nvidia was largely unknown just a few years ago.

In 2022, google searches for Jensen Huang, the company's charismatic CEO, were almost nonexistent. And Nvidia employees were not nearly the source of fascination and interest they are today.

Nvidia recruiters are now swamped at conferences, and platforms like Reddit and Blind are full of eager posters wondering how to land a job or at least get an interview at the company, which has around 30,000 employees.

They want to know how many Nvidians are millionaires — likely quite a few.

The skyrocketing stock price has made that the case, but so has the longevity of its employees. Twenty-year-plus tenures are not uncommon, and even now when AI talent has never been more prized, staff turnover has been falling in recent years. In January, the company reported a turnover rate of 2.7%. Tech industry turnover below 20% is notable, an HR firm told Business Insider earlier this year.

The data behind the evolution of Nvidia's workforce tells the story of the company's meteoric rise just as well, if not better than the revenue or stock price. Until the early 2000s, the chip design company, which was founded in 1993, was relatively under the radar. Here is Nvidia's story in four charts.

Nvidia's workforce has grown nearly 20-fold since 2003

Beyond Nvidia's historic rise in market value, the company has a lot to offer employees. It maintains a permissive remote work policy even as tech giants like Amazon mandate a return to the office. It has also built an appropriately futuristic new Santa Clara, California, headquarters which robotics leader Rev Lebaredian described to Business Insider as so tech-infused it is a "type of robot."

But the culture isn't for everyone.

Public feedback, for example, is a very intentional part of the workplace culture. Huang famously has dozens of direct reports and eschews one-on-one meetings, preferring to call out mistakes in public rather than saving harsh feedback for private conversation, so that everyone can learn.

Nvidia has become one of the best-paying firms in Silicon Valley

Four years ago, Nvidians' median salary wasn't at the top of the market. In 2019, Microsoft's median employee salary was nearly $20,000 higher than an Nvidia worker. But as of January 2024, Nvidia's median salary (excluding the CEO) surpassed Microsoft and has left other tech giants in the dust.

Yet, this chart only reports on base compensation.

Years of stock-based compensation and "special Jensen grants," along with four-digit growth in the stock price within the last decade, have led to wealthy employees and, at times, internal tension surrounding rich Nvidia employees not pulling their weight.

Certainly, not all Nvidians are millionaires and the compensation the company is required to report to shareholders every Spring isn't quite the full picture. Still, Huang has repeatedly said that despite Nvidia's AI dominance, he wakes up worrying about staying on top.

Nvidia's revenue per employee has recovered after years of investment

Divide the company's revenue by its employee headcount and its financial strategy shows through.

Beginning in 2006, long before using graphics processing units to run AI models was commonplace, Nvidia invested in building a programming software layer called compute unified device architecture (CUDA).

Nvidia's GPUs are capable of immense computing capacity at nearly unprecedented speed because they perform calculations simultaneously rather than one at a time. Instructing these powerful chips required a new software paradigm.

CUDA is that paradigm and building it took years and cost Nvidia dearly. In hindsight, the benefit of this investment period is undeniable. CUDA is the main element that keeps AI builders from easily or willingly switching to competing hardware like AMD's MI325 and Amazon's Trainium chips.

It's not a literal translation of every employee's contribution, but looking at the revenue-to-headcount ratio can show trends in efficiency, investment, and return.

Nvidia's revenue-to-headcount ratio showed a downward trend from 2003 until 2014, and then steady upward progress until the AI boom in 2023. During that year, this ratio doubled.

CUDA is likely not the only factor affecting this data point, but it may help explain why investors questioned CUDA expenditures for years — and why they no longer do.

But the company isn't as far ahead in other areas.

Nvidia has less than one in five women employees — but it has pay parity

Despite the dizzying progress of Nvidia's technological achievements, gender representation in the company's workforce and the semiconductor industry as a whole has remained relatively unchanged in the last decade. As of January 2024, Nvidia's global workforce was 19.7% female.

Nvidia's stats are in line with the industry totals for female representation, but ahead of the pack when it comes to women in technical and management positions.

According to a 2023 Accenture analysis, the median representation of women in the semiconductor industry is between 20% and 29%, up from between 20% and 25% in 2022. Over half of the companies in the sample reported less than 10% representation of women in technical director roles and less than 5% in technical executive leadership roles.

In January Nvidia reported that women at the company make 99.5% of what men make in terms of baseline compensation. For the last two years, the turnover rate for women at the company has been slightly lower than that for men.

Nvidia declined to comment on this dynamic when BI reported on it in September.

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