It took one sentence from Jensen Huang to move tens of billions of dollars. Marvell Technology shares surged about 25% in premarket trading on Tuesday after Nvidia’s chief executive, sharing a Computex stage in Taipei with Marvell boss Matt Murphy, predicted that the chip and networking company would be the next business to reach a $1tn valuation. That would be more than five times its current size.

Marvell’s valuation will climb now that the age of “useful AI has arrived,” Huang said, framing the company as a beneficiary of the same data-centre boom that has carried his own.

The Santa Clara firm makes the custom chips and optical interconnects that move data around AI clusters, the unglamorous plumbing of the boom rather than the headline processors. Its stock has gained roughly 158% this year, giving it a market value of about $192bn before Tuesday’s jump. If the premarket gain holds at the open, it would be Marvell’s biggest intraday move since May 2023.

Huang is not a disinterested cheerleader. Nvidia invested around $2bn in Marvell earlier this year, part of an effort to knit the smaller company’s custom silicon and networking gear more tightly into its own systems.

The endorsement, in other words, talks up a company Nvidia already owns a slice of, which is worth keeping in mind when a $5.4tn chief executive names the next member of his club.

The forecast landed amid a run of bullish chip news on the same day. Memory maker SK Hynix said it would double production capacity to ease a supply crunch. STMicroelectronics nearly doubled its 2026 data-centre revenue forecast, to about $1bn, and said sales could double again in 2027.

Arm said it expects to reach its $15bn semiconductor revenue target earlier than planned. The common thread is AI infrastructure spending, which the largest tech companies, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft among them, have pledged to fund to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars this year.

Nvidia has been the clearest winner of that spending, its shares up more than 1,400% since 2023 and its market value around $5.4tn. Much of the demand now flows through the kind of connective hardware Marvell sells, and Nvidia has been pouring money into the surrounding ecosystem, including a multibillion-dollar bet on the photonics meant to replace copper inside data centres. Huang used the same Taipei stage this year to call Taiwan the “epicentre” of the AI build-out.

Roughly 15 companies carried market values above $1tn as of Monday, almost all of them in technology. Marvell is not the most valuable company below that line; dozens are worth more. What it has, for now, is the loudest endorsement, and the share price to show for it. Whether the trillion follows is a different question, and one a Computex soundbite does not answer.

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.