Waymo is launching a loyalty program called Waymo Premier, which will offer frequent robotaxi riders a number of perks in exchange for $29.99 per month.

Premier members will be able to skip the virtual line and earn 10% cash back on every trip (and “even more during busy times,” according to Waymo). They’ll also get five free ride cancellations every month, and Waymo says Premier members will even be able to hail a robotaxi in cities where the service still has a waitlist.

Waymo Premier will not be available to riders in Austin or Atlanta, the company told TechCrunch, because its robotaxis are only available via the Uber app in those cities.

The loyalty program is launching as Waymo ramps up its expansion in the U.S., and prepares for an international launch later this year. Waymo is also starting to roll out its newest vehicle, the Zeekr-built van that it calls “Ojai,” in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

The Premier program could also be the start of a new line of business for Waymo as it scales.

The company’s biggest partner, Uber, has built a sizable revenue-generator with its own program, Uber One. The ride-hail giant said in May that more than 50 million people now pay $9.99 per month (or $96 per year) for a membership. In exchange, Uber offers perks like 10% off of Uber Eats orders or hotel bookings, waived delivery fees, and other third-party discounts and promotions.

Loyalty programs are an even bigger business for airlines. The four biggest U.S. airlines would have each operated at a loss in 2024 if not for their money-printing memberships. The airlines have also shown how loyalty programs can provide value beyond the revenue they generate: During the pandemic, many of them used the programs as collateral to back emergency loans from the federal government.

Waymo said it arrived at the $29.99 monthly price and accompanying perks after considering “direct feedback from our riders on what they want out of a membership.” While it may be three times the cost of Uber One, rider data has shown that people are willing to pay more for Waymo robotaxis than for traditional ride-hail options.

Jensen Huang’s comments at Computex defend the Samsung bonus structure that delivers $400,000 to chip engineers, but land alongside an $80bn Nvidia buyback announced two weeks ago.

Jensen Huang, the Nvidia chief executive, told reporters on the sidelines of Computex in Taipei on Tuesday that workers should be paid “as much as possible,” framing the principle as the response to a question about Samsung Electronics’ new bonus structure that delivers as much as $400,000 to memory chip engineers.

“I pay my employees as much as I can,” Jensen Huang said, before adding, “but it doesn’t make this right,” in an unusual public hedging from a CEO who almost never qualifies his own positions in real time.

The Samsung context is the trigger for the question. The Korean memory firm’s union and management reached a deal earlier this month, after a near-strike that survived an injunction filing from a smaller non-chip union, that allocates 10.5% of semiconductor operating profit to chip-division bonuses, with payouts of up to 600 million won (about $400,000) per memory-division worker contingent on sustained profit targets through 2035.

The arrangement was described in Reuters analysis as the largest single profit-share commitment in major Korean corporate history. Samsung supplies HBM4 to Nvidia for the Vera Rubin platform, which made the question to Huang structurally relevant rather than merely topical.

The harder context is the cash-return commitment Nvidia announced two weeks before Huang’s remarks. The company’s Q1 fiscal 2027 results, released on 18 May, included an $80bn share repurchase authorisation, a quarterly cash-dividend increase from $0.01 to $0.25 per share (a 2,400% lift), and a stated commitment to return at least 50% of free cash flow to shareholders through 2026 and beyond. The company returned a record $20bn to shareholders in the quarter alone.

Nvidia’s $81.6bn quarterly revenue and 85% year-on-year growth comfortably support the return profile, but the arithmetic relationship matters: the buyback alone is larger than Nvidia’s total annual payroll many times over.

The two positions Huang is now publicly holding, that workers should be paid as much as possible and that Nvidia should return half its free cash flow to shareholders, are not strictly in tension. Both can be true; the company has the cash to do both.

But the public framing matters at a moment when corporate AI productivity gains are increasingly accumulating to shareholders rather than to workforces, and when Morgan Stanley’s European-banking forecast last week doubled the projected AI-driven job-loss figure to 20%.

Huang’s instinctive defence of high worker pay, even with the “it doesn’t make this right” hedge, is the closest a major AI-infrastructure CEO has come to publicly acknowledging the labour-and-capital tension the AI build-out is producing.

The other Huang comment from this week’s Computex appearances is worth noting alongside. Huang told a separate audience that Nvidia engineers should be using AI tokens worth roughly half their annual salary every year to remain productive, framing non-use of AI tools as analogous to designing chips with pencil and paper.

That position is, on its own terms, a defence of generous worker compensation in token-purchasing rather than salary terms: if engineers are issued $100,000-$150,000 in annual token budget on top of base pay, the realised compensation package is materially larger than the published salary figure suggests.

It is also a framing that depends entirely on AI-token costs remaining at current pricing rather than continuing to rise on the trajectory Commonwealth Bank’s Matt Comyn flagged this week.

Nvidia employs roughly 36,000 people globally. Average compensation per employee, on the company’s most recent disclosures, runs to several hundred thousand dollars including stock-based compensation. The AI boom has driven Nvidia’s share price up roughly 1,170% over the past five years, which has made meaningful numbers of Nvidia employees who hold restricted-stock units into multi-millionaires through normal vesting cycles.

His remark therefore lands inside an Nvidia compensation reality that has, by the standards of large public technology companies, already been unusually worker-favourable.

Huang is travelling to Seoul this week to meet Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Jae-yong and other Korean industrial leaders. The bonus-structure question will likely come up again. The public position Huang has now taken is harder to walk back than the standard executive non-answer.