As Big Tech showers employees with perks to win the talent war, Nvidia built a nearly $5 trillion company by making people pay for their own lunch

Nvidia may be worth $4.8 trillion, but its employees still have to pay up at the company cafeteria. The chipmaker fueling the AI boom, led by CEO Jensen Huang, is the most valuable company in the world by market cap, towering above other tech giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon. But that doesn’t mean the company is giving away lunch for free. Gergely Orosz, a software engineer and author of the The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, highlighted the issue of Nvidia’s food policies in a thread on X after a recent visit to the company’s Santa Clara, Calif. headquarters. “Snacks and coffee are not free: You have to pay for them. This would be unusual at Big Tech, but no big deal for devs here,” Orosz wrote in a post. Former employees who spoke to Business Insider clarified the company’s cafeteria meals are subsidized, not free. While coffee is generally free, employees must pay for some bottled drinks and drinks from on-site cafés. Nvidia did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. The company’s food policies have reportedly been around for more than a decade. A blog by a former intern who worked at Nvidia in 2014 shows even then the food at Nvidia was subsidized, not free, and averaged about $6, or about $8.50 today. Some food options in 2014 included chicken and pasta, chicken and rice, fish and chips, and sandwiches. Nvidia’s food policy stands apart from other tech companies of its size. The most notable among them is Google, which helped kick off the trend of lavish employee perks that for years have defined tech workplaces. Unlike Nvidia, Google provides free breakfast, lunch, and dinner at cafeterias across its offices. Its GooglePlex headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. reportedly has about 30 locations for employees to grab a bite to eat. Yet, at Google, the food is secondary to the connections that come from communion, according to Ruth Porat, the chief investment officer of Google and parent company Alphabet. She said its stocked “micro