Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang dismissed as “ridiculous” the forecast that AI will wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs, and Kalshi traders are siding with him.

The platform’s market on 2026 unemployment is pricing just a 34% chance the rate climbs above 5%.

The Forecast Huang Rejected

Huang made the comments in an interview released yesterday with the Special Competitive Studies Project, ahead of next week’s AI+ Expo in Washington.

The Nvidia chief appeared to reference Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who warned earlier this year that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and push unemployment as high as 20%.

Huang said comments like those come from CEOs with “a god complex” and risk steering young people away from careers the economy still needs filling.

“That it’s going to wipe out 50% of new college grad jobs, that it’s going to completely destroy democracy. These kind of comments are not helpful,” Huang said.

Traders Aren’t Buying The Doom Case

Kalshi’s pricing backs up Huang’s case. Traders are giving a 34% chance unemployment climbs above 5% next year, and the odds thin out fast from there: 15.7% for above 6%, 12.9% for above 7%, and 6.2% for above 8%.

The consensus forecast sits at 3.8% and has been drifting lower since a brief spike above 5% in March, when recession chatter peaked. The contract has drawn more than $580,000 in volume.

Polymarket traders are pricing the same view a touch more cautiously. Its market on US unemployment climbing above 5% in 2026 sits at 47%, down 12 points from a spike near 80% in early April, with $372,000 in volume.

Software Engineers Still In Demand

Huang pointed to software engineering as evidence the doom case is already misfiring. Despite years of warnings that coding jobs would vanish, Nvidia and most major tech firms are hiring more engineers than ever, he said.

He drew a parallel to a decade-old prediction that radiologists would be wiped out by computer vision. The technology arrived. The radiologists are still in short supply.

“The purpose of the job is not coding. The purpose of the job is to innovate, solve problems,” Huang said.

Huang said AI has already created more than half a million jobs in the last two years, and called it the country’s best shot at reindustrializing.

He is betting Nvidia on that thesis, committing half a trillion dollars in U.S. supply chain consumption to bring chip and computer manufacturing onshore. The buildout could ripple through suppliers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (NYSE:TSM).

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