AI not behind layoffs? Jensen Huang rebukes CEOs over blame-game months after ‘AI cost’ claims

Surprisingly, Huang seemingly appeared to stay on AI’s side months after one of the top executives at his own company firmly affirmed that artificial intelligence is more expensive than actual workers. Notably, his latest remarks on the tech advancement come over a week after the Nvidia CEO delivered the commencement address to Carnegie Mellon University’s Class of 2026. Huang ultimately joined the surging trend of graduation speakers being booed at US universities for their AI-focused speeches.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismisses blaming layoffs on AI

In the Monday interview, Huang criticised CEOs holding the rise of AI responsible for layoffs. “I think the narrative that connects AI to job loss for many of the CEOs that are doing it, it is just too lazy,” Huang told CNA. He went on to ask, “AI has just arrived. 
How is it possible they’re already losing jobs?”

Pointing out that it “doesn’t make any sense” for companies to blame layoffs on AI before generative AI tools became popular in the workplace, Huang added, “How is it possible that AI became productive and useful only six months ago, and they were somehow laying people off two years ago because of AI?”

He also suggested that some top bosses were employing the AI narrative, which he “really hate(s),” to “sound smart.” Rebuking all those behind the troubling jargon, he urged CEOs to opt for a “balanced narrative.”

“I think we’re scaring people and that’s irresponsible,” the Nvidia CEO continued.

Similar to the statements he made for the CNA interview this week, Huang earned heavy applause for an AI-focused speech he delivered to Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) graduating class earlier this month. Despite his message echoing what real estate executive Gloria Caulfield told a graduating class at the University of Central Florida (UCF), responses to each speech were poles apart, and it all had to do with their audiences.

While Caulfield told a roomful of arts and humanities students that “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Huang told a heavily science-focused university’s graduating class, “Your career starts at the beginning of the AI revolution.”

Although delivered a week apart, Caulfield’s speech was booed off stage while Huang’s message earned cheers at different universities.

These developments, in turn, follow what Nvidia’s VP of Applied Deep Learning, Bryan Catanzaro, told Axios in April: “For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees.”

The surge of AI-driven layoffs

Huang’s remarks have generated buzz at a time when fresh graduates and industry insiders alike are growing more scared about job prospects and their professional stability and security. His claims also sharply contradict the AI-focused jargon many big companies are increasingly using to break the sad news to employees.

Through memos announcing sweeping layoffs affecting thousands, the likes of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are telling employees “AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetime,” and that “success isn’t a given” in a cut-throat professional industry driven by artificial intelligence.

Zuckerberg’s social media giant is hardly the first company to blame for the rising rounds of layoffs in the tech world of AI.

Earlier this month, Cisco Systems’ CEO Chuck Robbins told employees in a memo that “the companies that will win in the AI era will be those with focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment,” which meant “making hard decisions.” Consequently, the company announced plans to cut under 4,000 jobs, making up about 5% of its workforce.

Similarly, financial services provider Block let go of more than 4,000 people from its 10,000-plus workforce. “The core thesis is simple. Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,” CEO Jack Dorsey said in a letter to shareholders back then. “A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better.”

Not just tech, but even a news agency like The Washington Post (though owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos) left about 30% of its workforce heartbroken with a layoff announcement this February, decimating teams behind sports, local news, and international coverage.

In a call with newsroom employees at the time, The Post’s executive editor Matt Murray said, “If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape.”

Further detailing the rationale fuelling the job cuts, Murray explained that The Post had lost too much money, having been “rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product.” Additionally, he pointed out that online search traffic had also taken a hit in the wake of the generative AI boom.

What do the numbers say?

As mounting announcements continue to fuel the belief that advanced technology is replacing workers, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas also estimated in a May report that companies rolled out over 50,000 job cuts linked to AI in the first quarter of 2026, marking a 40% increase from the numbers recorded in the same period last year.

The highlighted figures further suggested that these layoffs make up about 17% of the roughly 300,000 job cuts announced so far in 2026.

Similarly, research from Goldman Sachs showed that AI cut monthly payroll growth by roughly 16,000 jobs last year, raising the unemployment rate by 0.1%.

US President Donald Trump was also recently asked by a media representative what he would tell people worried about potentially losing their jobs to AI. “I’ll tell you, AI’s been amazing, because right now, we have more jobs, more people working right now in the US by far than ever ever had before.”

In line with Trump’s claims, the World Economic Forum cited LinkedIn data, showing that AI had actually been a growth area, creating 1.3 million new roles.

“While there is evidence that AI is impacting jobs in small pockets, it’s also creating demand at scale – including more than 600,000 new, AI-enabled data centre jobs and 1.3 million new roles like AI Engineers, Forward-Deployed Engineers and Data Annotators. Additionally, AI Engineer is one of the fastest‑growing jobs on LinkedIn over the past three years, reflecting sustained demand for AI-centric roles ranging from Directors of AI to Machine Learning Researchers,” the report stated. “This mix of uneven hiring and AI-driven job creation marks the emergence of the new-collar era, a workforce that blends knowledge work, advanced technical skills, and distinctly human strengths.”

As opposed to Trump’s praise for AI, California Governor Gavin Newsom has chosen to walk a different path. Merely days ago, the Democratic leader signed a first-of-its-kind executive order to confront the impacts of AI on workers. The US state dominates AI innovation, with 33 of the top 50 private AI companies in the world based in California. 

Newsom’s order “mobilises state agencies, labor experts, economists, universities, and industry leaders to develop new policies, gather data, and identify early warning signs of workforce disruption — while ensuring workers share in the gains created by AI-driven productivity,” according to an official news release.