Business
Jensen Huang shrugs off Trump’s $100K visa fee, says Nvidia will foot the potential $147 million bill anyway: ‘Legal immigration remains essential’
Jensen Huang said Nvidia will keep sponsoring H-1B employees, but Trump’s new $100,000 fee means the company may have to shell out millions more to keep doing so.
Nvidia would have to pay an estimated $147.3 million if President Donald Trump’s newest fee applied to the H-1B visaholders the company got approved in 2025, according to a calculation based on data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The new $100,000 fee applies only to new H-1B visa applicants and not to those renewing their visas or current visaholders.
“Legal immigration remains essential to ensuring the U.S. continues to lead in technology and ideas,” Huang reportedly wrote in an internal employee memo this week, Business Insider reported.
While even a multi-million-dollar potential jump in Nvidia’s fee payments for visa applicants may seem insignificant to a company with a market cap of $4.5 trillion, the new charges represent a big increase from the between $2,000 and $5,000 per applicant companies were paying before.
A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment.
Essential for talent
Nvidia is not in the top 10 of Fortune 500 companies with the most employees approved for an H-1B visa in 2025. Other Fortune 500 companies with more H-1B visas approved this year include Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, according to government data.
Huang, who was born in Taiwan and came to the U.S. as a child, previously spoke positively about President Trump on the new H-1B visa changes, but has recently criticized some parts of the effort. While Huang has always been pro-immigration, he previously said he was “glad to see” Trump sign the executive order that levied the new H-1B visa fee.
After his initially positive response, Huang noted in a podcast interview last month that while the new fee eliminates abuses of the visa system, the $100,000 fee “probably sets the bar a little too high.”
In the internal memo this week, Huang said Nvidia would continue to sponsor H-1B visa employees and talked up his support for immigrant workers.
“As one of many immigrants at Nvidia, I know that the opportunities we’ve found in America have profoundly shaped our lives,” he wrote in the memo, according to Business Insider. “And the miracle of Nvidia — built by all of you, and by brilliant colleagues around the world — would not be possible without immigration.”
