During Computex 2025, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, announced that he was opening a second R&D Centre in the island country of Taiwan, known as Constellation. The office is obviously going to need to staff the office when it opens up, but more importantly, it’ll need people and engineers well-versed in AI.
So, it comes as little surprise that a report that NVIDIA is poaching engineers from other tech companies has surfaced. According to Taiwan’s EBC News, the GPU brand is supposedly poaching engineers from TSMC, its very own provider of chips for its GPUs over the past several years.
And the way NVIDIA is allegedly enticing and convincing them to jump ship is by offering them really good salaries. The starting salary for a Masters graduate is between US$50,000 and US$83,000 (between RM211,525 and RM351,131), US$100,000 (~RM423,000) for an AI engineer with around three years of experience, and as much as US$180,000 (~RM761,490) for a senior engineer to join its ranks.
While those salaries may seem “low” to some in other places, it is important to point out that, in Taiwan, there is a culture of providing employees with some very generous annual bonus. That, and the potentially lucrative stock options NVIDIA typically gives to staff. Poaching highly qualified talents from relevant industry isn’t anything new or unheard of, and to NVIDIA’s credit, it isn’t the first time that they’ve done this.
Again, the GPU company’s recruitment drive is to fill the vacancies for the Taiwan-based Constellation office, and not its US offices. That indirectly translates to a lower cost of living when compared to the US, with one data analyst site indicating that the number is 24.9% cheaper.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware)
