Nvidia's $150B Buyback: the Biggest in US Corporate History

Nvidia's board has approved the largest share-repurchase authorization in American corporate history — a $150 billion signal that the AI boom has far more runway than Wall Street fears.

Published September 29, 2026 · By Daniel Rao

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaking at Stanford University's CS 153 course on April 30, 2026. Photo: Anderseidesvik, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

On Monday, Nvidia did something no American company has ever done. The chipmaker's board of directors approved a $150 billion increase to its share-repurchase program — the single largest buyback authorization increase ever granted by a US public company.

The announcement, made after the market opened on September 28, 2026, eclipses the previous record holder, Apple, which authorized $110 billion in buybacks in May 2024. According to data from Birinyi Associates cited by MarketWatch, Nvidia's move is now the largest authorization in US corporate history, full stop.

Investors wasted no time rendering a verdict: Nvidia shares rose more than 2% on Monday. But the real story is not the one-day pop. It is what the world's most valuable company is telling Wall Street about the durability of the AI boom — at a moment when skeptics are asking, loudly, how long the buildout can possibly last.

The announcement, in brief

The numbers, as reported Monday by Reuters, Dow Jones Newswires and MarketWatch, are staggering. Nvidia's board approved a $150 billion increase to its existing share-repurchase authorization, bringing the company's total remaining buyback capacity to $235 billion. The company says it will execute the repurchases through fiscal 2028, which ends in January 2028.

This is not Nvidia's first swing at the buyback window. The new authorization comes just four months after the company added $80 billion to the program — meaning Nvidia has expanded its buyback capacity by $230 billion in less than half a year. For context, that four-month increase alone is more than double the record Apple's $110 billion authorization set two years ago.

The scale only makes sense when set against the company's size. With a market capitalization topping $5.4 trillion, Nvidia is the largest company in the world, and its cash generation has reached a level that strains comparison. In the first half of fiscal 2027, Nvidia pulled in roughly $177.8 billion in revenue and generated about $70 billion in free cash flow, according to Dow Jones Newswires. During that same half-year window, the company spent $39.8 billion buying back 203 million of its own shares — a pace that, even before Monday's announcement, made it one of the most aggressive repurchasers in the market.

Bigger than Apple: a record that rewrites the playbook

Corporate America has been on a buyback spree for two decades, but Monday's announcement moves the goalposts. Apple's $110 billion authorization in May 2024 was itself considered an eye-watering figure at the time — the largest single buyback authorization ever approved by a public company. Nvidia has now taken that record and raised it by more than a third.

The symbolism matters as much as the money. Apple has long been the standard-bearer of the mature-tech playbook: as revenue growth slows and valuations compress, return cash to shareholders and let the compounding do the talking. Ben Barringer, equity research analyst at Quilter Cheviot, told Reuters the Nvidia buyback echoes exactly that playbook — the use of repurchases as growth slows and earnings multiples come under pressure.

There is a distinction worth making, and Nvidia's board would presumably want investors to make it. Apple was deep into its maturity phase when its buyback machine reached full throttle. Nvidia is authorizing the biggest buyback in corporate history while it is still, by most measures, the fastest-growing industrial company on the planet. That contrast is precisely what makes the announcement so arresting: a growth-stage company deploying a mature-stage financial weapon, in mature-stage quantities.

Why the market needed convincing

To understand why Nvidia felt the need to make this move now, look at how the market has been treating the stock. Through Friday's close, Nvidia shares were up just over 20% year to date — roughly in line with the Nasdaq 100, but a humbling performance next to its chipmaking peers. AMD has more than doubled in 2026. Intel has more than tripled.

That relative underperformance is not an accident. It reflects a genuine, growing debate among investors about the sustainability of the AI spending boom. Data center operators, cloud providers and governments have poured hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure, and a vocal camp on Wall Street is asking what happens if the returns on that spending arrive slower — or smaller — than expected. Every wobble in that consensus shows up in Nvidia's stock first, because Nvidia is the purest listed proxy for AI capital expenditure on earth.

The valuation data tells the same story of compression. Nvidia now trades at about 16.5 times 12-month forward earnings, according to LSEG data cited by Reuters — the lowest forward multiple the company has carried since January 2015. That sits far below its 15-year average of 30 times. Put plainly: the market is pricing Nvidia's future earnings growth at a fraction of what it used to demand, because it is no longer certain the growth will arrive.

That is the fear Monday's announcement is designed to counter. Jacob Bourne, an analyst at Emarketer, told Reuters that the buyback signals Nvidia's confidence in durable demand: "The AI buildout won't continue at its current pace forever, but Nvidia is signaling confidence that demand for its hardware and services has staying power." He added: "Its cash generation is currently strong enough that it believes it can continue investing heavily in the business while also returning capital to shareholders."

The cash machine behind the move

It is worth pausing on the cash figures, because they explain how a company can promise to spend up to $235 billion on its own shares while simultaneously funding the largest infrastructure buildout in industrial history. Roughly $177.8 billion in first-half revenue. Roughly $70 billion in first-half free cash flow. And $39.8 billion already deployed on 203 million shares repurchased in that half.

CEO Jensen Huang framed the authorization as a statement of capacity rather than caution. "Our cash generation gives us the capacity to invest in the technologies that advance this transformation and return capital to shareholders," he said in a statement reported by MarketWatch. "This authorization reflects our confidence in the long-term opportunity ahead."

Read that statement carefully. Huang is not presenting a trade-off between growth investment and shareholder returns; he is rejecting the premise that one must come at the expense of the other. Nvidia's argument is that it can do both — fund the AI buildout at full throttle and still return hundreds of billions to shareholders — because the cash engine is that powerful. Whether investors fully believe that is another question, but Monday's 2% gain suggests the first reaction was relief: the company with the best visibility into AI demand just told the market that demand is fine.

Nvidia's headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The chipmaker, now worth more than $5.4 trillion, has authorized the largest share buyback in US corporate history. Photo: Coolcaesar, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Confidence, not caution: the AI arms race continues

Crucially, the buyback is not a signal that Nvidia is throttling back its ambitions elsewhere. The company continues to pour capital into AI laboratories, data centers, power infrastructure and its supplier ecosystem, according to WealthAdvisor — while pushing back against suggestions that its investments amount to circular financing, the practice of funding customers who then turn around and buy the funder's products.

The demand side of the equation keeps producing evidence that Nvidia's confidence is grounded. Consider Elon Musk's GPU blitz — a planned deployment of 660,000 Nvidia GB300s — the kind of order that simply did not exist in the chip industry five years ago. When a single customer can absorb hundreds of thousands of flagship accelerators, the question of whether AI demand has staying power starts to look very different from the trading floor's anxieties.

There is also a strategic dimension to buying back stock at 16.5 times forward earnings. If management genuinely believes the market is undervaluing the company's earnings trajectory — and the subdued multiple suggests the market is pricing in a slowdown — then repurchasing shares at these levels is, in the board's judgment, one of the highest-return investments available. Every share retired at a compressed multiple accrues to the remaining shareholders if earnings keep growing. It is the same arithmetic Apple has run for years, now executed at a scale Apple never attempted.

Same day, two messages

Monday was a busy day in Santa Clara. Alongside the buyback announcement, Nvidia also unveiled its Open Agent Safety Platform — a framework for safer autonomous AI agents that TechPulse USA covered in detail when the news broke. The pairing is telling: on the same day, the company addressed the two debates that most define its moment — whether the AI boom can sustain itself financially, and whether the technology it is building can be kept safe.

Read our full breakdown of Nvidia's Open Agent Safety Platform launch for what the safety framework means for the agent economy. Taken together, the two announcements sketch a company that believes it can simultaneously accelerate, govern and pay out — a posture of total confidence that few firms in history have been in a position to strike.

Nvidia $150B buyback FAQ

How big is the new buyback?

A $150B increase to the existing authorization, bringing total remaining buyback capacity to $235B. Nvidia says it will execute the program through fiscal 2028, which ends in January 2028.

Whose record did it break?

Apple's. The previous largest single US buyback authorization was Apple's $110B in May 2024; Nvidia's increase is more than a third bigger. Nvidia's $230B of buyback expansion in four months is more than double Apple's old record.

Is the money actually being spent?

An authorization is not a purchase. The $39.8B Nvidia spent buying back 203M shares in the first half of fiscal 2027 is the concrete evidence of follow-through; the rest depends on the quarterly pace.

Why is Nvidia doing this now?

The stock trades at about 16.5x forward earnings, its lowest multiple since January 2015, amid Wall Street doubts about AI-spending durability. The board is signaling that durable demand justifies buying its own shares — and investors' first read was relief: shares rose more than 2% Monday.

What it means for investors — the mechanics and the caveats

For shareholders, the mechanics of a buyback are straightforward: fewer shares outstanding means each remaining share claims a larger slice of future earnings, which supports earnings per share and, typically, the stock price. With $235 billion in authorized capacity through January 2028, Nvidia has given itself room to retire a meaningful portion of its float even at a $5.4 trillion valuation.

But a few caveats belong in any honest accounting, and they separate verified fact from analysis. First, an authorization is not a purchase. Nvidia's board has approved the capacity to buy back up to $235 billion in shares; the actual pace and timing will depend on market conditions, and companies routinely leave authorizations partially unused. The $39.8 billion deployed in the first half of fiscal 2027 is the concrete evidence of follow-through so far.

Second, buybacks do not create demand for AI chips. They are a capital-allocation decision, not a revenue event. If hyperscaler spending genuinely decelerates, no repurchase program — however historic — will rescue the earnings trajectory. The buyback is a signal about management's expectations, and signals can be wrong.

Third, the calendar matters. The authorization runs through fiscal 2028, ending January 2028 — roughly sixteen months away. That is a long window, and it means the market will be watching the quarterly pace of repurchases as a real-time read on management's conviction. Aggressive early buying would reinforce the confidence narrative; a slow start would invite questions about whether the announcement was more theater than intent.

Still, the balance of the evidence favors the bullish reading. A company generating $70 billion in half-year free cash flow does not authorize the largest buyback in American corporate history as a defensive gesture. Nvidia's board has looked at the order books, the data-center pipeline and the competitive landscape and concluded that its own stock, at its lowest forward multiple in more than a decade, is the best use of a meaningful share of that cash. In a year when AMD has doubled and Intel has tripled, Nvidia is betting — $150 billion of it — that the market has the AI leader wrong.

Whether that bet pays off will be decided by earnings, not announcements. But Monday's message was unambiguous: the company at the center of the AI boom believes the boom has further to run. Wall Street, which spent the year doubting, now has $235 billion of reasons to reconsider.

Sources: This article was reported from coverage by Reuters (Anhata Rooprai), Dow Jones Newswires via Morningstar (Colin Kellaher), MarketWatch via Morningstar (Emily Bary), CNN and WealthAdvisor. Valuation data cited from LSEG; historical buyback data from Birinyi Associates. Analyst commentary from Jacob Bourne of Emarketer and Ben Barringer of Quilter Cheviot.