Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he supports taxes on the ultra-wealthy but broke sharply with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates over a proposal to tax robots and AI systems, arguing that automation creates jobs rather than destroying them.
Gates revived his long-standing idea in an essay this week, writing: 'Right now, if you're an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.'
Gates argued governments will need new revenue because AI-driven job losses will shrink income-tax collections. 'A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net,' he wrote.
Huang, in an interview with Fox Business's 'The Claman Countdown,' rejected the framing. 'I love the heck out of Bill … but I don't see what he sees. I see something very, very different. And so my remedies will be a little different,' the 63-year-old executive said.
He added: 'I'm in favor of taxes. And I think that … for anybody who is productive, it's a great way for us to contribute back to society and the economy. But the fact of the matter is, there are probably lots of different ways to approach this.'
Huang argued that history undercuts Gates's premise that firms quietly swap workers for machines. 'When companies are more productive, they don't lay off people, they hire more people,' he said, noting that 'companies have ambitions for growth' and that higher productivity and profitability let firms 'invest more and go after more growth.'
He predicted the AI shift would be 'a net job creator at a scale that we have never seen,' while acknowledging some jobs will be disrupted. Huang has previously said blue-collar trades such as plumbers and electricians will see rising demand as data centers are built out, describing the moment as a reindustrialization of the United States: 'We have lots and lots of white-collar workers, but we're also going to have a lot of skilled labor … We want to reindustrialize the United States. We want to create more jobs.'
Gates struck a more cautious tone in his essay, warning of risks world leaders aren't ready for — including stunted child development, emboldened criminals, and vanishing jobs for Gen Z — even as he touted AI's potential to improve medicine, education, and bureaucratic efficiency.
Gates's robot tax is, in substance, a levy on productivity itself — a fresh charge on the machinery that lets American companies do more with the capital they already have. Huang's rebuttal echoes the free-market case against it: tax investment in efficiency, and firms get less of it, along with fewer of the growth-driven jobs that follow.
The two men agree the wealthiest can bear a heavier tax load. Where they split is whether Washington should tax the machinery of growth on its way in the door. History and the market, so far, have sided with the builders who invest first and let productivity do the hiring.
