Executive pay among chipmakers and other hardware companies in recent years has been as volatile as the market itself: booming amid demand and success and dropping with failures.
Several top chief executives got big stock awards and bonuses recently as their US-based companies plan to take advantage of promised new public investments in domestic production of semiconductors, showing that the industry’s advocacy paid off for them.
1. Patrick Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, $178.6 million
Gelsinger started his career at Intel more than 40 years ago as the company’s first chief technology officer and is credited with helping to create an industry for USB and Wi-Fi technologies as well as playing a key role in Intel’s processor programs.
He rejoined Intel in 2021 and was tasked with leading a major manufacturing push for the company. His base salary when he started was $1.5 million but he garnered $140.4 million in stock awards and a $1.75 million bonus that year, making him the highest paid CEO in the industry.
2. Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom, $60.6 million
Broadcom's president and CEO Hock E. Tan made $60.6 million in 2022 thanks largely to nearly $54 million stock awards given to him. He makes a base salary of $1.2 million, making him by far the highest paid person at Broadcom.
Tan has been one of the highest paid people in all of tech since the company moved to the US from Singapore in 2017, when he reported earning more than $100 million in total compensation that year.
3. Gregory Bryant, executive vice president and president of business units for Analog Devices, $34.2 million
Bryant was named EVP of Analog Devices in March 2022 to help with company growth after it acquired Maxim Integrated, a $20 billion mega-deal to create a combined company worth over $68 billion. Bryant was tapped to run Analog Device’s business units, including digital healthcare and industrial.
Bryant was EVP and general manager of Intel’s computing group. For joining Analog, he was awarded $31.5 million in stock to boost his $475,962 base salary.
4. David Goeckeler, CEO of Western Digital Corp., $32.1 million
Goeckeler came to Western Digital at the beginning of 2020 after a 20-year stint at Cisco Systems, largely in its networking and security arm.
Goeckeler was credited by the company with a big increase, 67%, in operating income for Western Digital and managing the company through pandemic-related supply chain challenges. For that his total pay for 2022 reached $32.1 million thanks largely to stock awards given to him that boosted his $1.25 million base salary, almost doubling what he made in 2021.
5. Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, $29.5 million
A decade at AMD, after 13 years at IBM, has made Lisa Su one of the most influential and wealthy women in the tech industry. Su has made about $1 million each year as a base salary at AMD for the past three years but earned more than $90 million stock awards and bonuses over the years.
Those stock awards came after Su helped expand AMD’s market cap to $133.21 billion this year, up from about $2 when she was first named CEO in 2014.
6. Sanjay Mehrotra, president and CEO of Micron Technology Inc., $28.8 million
Sanjay Mehrotra helped found SanDisk in 1988 and helped grow it to a company reporting $6 billion in annual revenue and a purchase by Western Digital for $16 billion in 2016. A year later Mehrotra joined Micron, a post he’s used to advocate for expanding the federal investment in semiconductors and other technologies.
Mehrotra’s base salary has grown slightly from $1.35 million in 2021 to $1.4 million in 2022, but his total compensation grew over that same time from $25.3 million to $28.8 million thanks to big stock awards from Micron.
7. Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia Corp., $23.7 million
Jen-Hsun Huang, known commonly as Jensen Huang, founded Nvidia 30 years ago and has led the company as president from its roots in computing graphics to its growth into chip systems for vehicles and robotics.
Huang’s total compensation more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, growing from $11.5 million to $23.7 million thanks to generous stock awards and multi-million-dollar bonuses.
8. Vincent Roche, CEO of Analog Devices, Inc., $22 million
Roche serves as CEO and chair of the board of directors Analog Devices. He’s held leadership positions at the company for a decade, as Analog Devices’s stock price has risen from about $35 per share in early 2012 to more than $181 at the start of March.
Roche actually saw his total compensation for the year fall in 2022, from $30.8 million to $22 million. About $345,000 of his 2022 compensation was personal use of the company aircraft, according to SEC filings. He’s made a little more than $1 million in base salary the last three years but was given more in stock awards, options, and bonuses.
9. Richard Templeton, chairman and CEO of Texas Instruments Inc., $19.2 million
Templeton has one of the steadiest incomes of anyone on this list, making about $19 million each year from 2019 to 2021. Every year he gets a roughly $1.3 million base salary, a bonus ranging from $3.5 million to $4.1 million and stock awards totaling $6.5 million.
Over that same period Texas Instrument’s market cap has risen from about $90 billion in early 2019 to $170 billion in early 2022. Templeton in the late 1990s let the company’s semiconductor business then was named CEO in 2004. He will be replaced as CEO of the company in April by Haviv Ilan, currently the operating chief of TI, the company announced in January.
10. Manish Bhatia, EVP of Micron Systems, $18.5 million
Bhatia is executive vice president of global operations at Micron, joining the company in 2017 to drive direction for its end-to-end operations. In that role he’s been the face of Micron’s recent announcements that it will build new two new factories in the US, one near its headquartered in Boise, Idaho and another near Syracuse, N.Y.
Bhatia had a $725,607 base salary and was given nearly $8 million in stock awards in 2022. His total reported compensation got a major boost from tax equalization payments of $8,388,304 related to his overseas assignment in Singapore, according to SEC filings. These payments are often given to people who work overseas to offset taxes paid to foreign countries.
11. Ganesh Moorthy, president and CEO Of Microchip Technology Inc., $12.8 million
Moorthy was named president and CEO of Microchip Technology and appointed to its board of directors in early 2021, moves that came with some significant compensation increases for the long-term executive at the company.
Moorthy’s base salary in 2022 was $565,862 and he garnered $10.5 million in stock awards that year. The year before his total compensation--salary, bonus and stock awards—was $3.9 million.
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