Nvidia has added $150 billion to its share repurchase authorization, the largest single increase in corporate history, and said it expects to run the total remaining program of $235 billion through fiscal year 2028. The board’s decision, announced September 28, gives the chipmaker room to retire stock for at least another two years while it sits inside the costliest stretch of the AI buildout.
Authorization is not spending. The $235 billion is what remains after the increase, not a commitment to reach it, and no schedule accompanies the number. The company has not said when it accelerates repurchases under the new headroom, only that it expects to execute the program through fiscal 2028. Authorizations of this size are frequently left partly unused, and the figure that shows up in filings each quarter is the one that counts.
The pace so far has been heavy. Nvidia bought back roughly $34 billion of stock in fiscal 2025, more than $40 billion in fiscal 2026, and another $39 billion in the first half of fiscal 2027, which ran through July. That run rate is what makes the new headline plausible rather than distant.
Chief executive Jensen Huang tied the decision to demand. Nvidia’s growth, he said, is driven by a shift to accelerated computing, and cash generation gives the company room to invest in that shift while returning capital to shareholders.
Nvidia said in its press release: our cash generation gives us the capacity to invest in the technologies that advance this transformation and return capital to shareholders, and the authorization reflects our confidence in the long-term opportunity ahead.
Analysts at Zacks noted that the authorization lets the company buy up to about 2.8 percent of its shares through open market purchases, a figure that understates the effect because it excludes the accretive effect on earnings per share from shrinking a share count this large. NVIDIA stock rose on the announcement and has held the gain through the first days of October.
The timing matters as much as the size. The announcement landed in a stretch where the AI financing debate turned louder. SoftBank paid the final $10 billion tranche of its $30 billion OpenAI follow-on on October 1, closing a $40 billion bridge loan, and it has raised roughly $37 billion from bonds and loans this year to fund the bet. Australia’s Firmus, a data center operator backed by Nvidia itself, is preparing a $5.5 billion IPO while prospective investors question a valuation that tripled in two months. Against that backdrop, a record buyback reads as a statement that the largest beneficiary of the buildout intends to return cash instead of raising more.
Nvidia also set a fresh product date in the same window. The 64GB version of DGX Spark, its desktop AI machine, goes on sale October 23 at $4,999 in the US, built on the same GB10 Grace Blackwell superchip as the 128GB model. The company paired the buyback with an Open Agent Safety Platform announcement, an open software layer for monitoring third-party systems.
What the market did with it
The stock rose on the announcement, and sell-side commentary centered on the signal rather than the mechanics. A company with the largest share of AI accelerator shipments choosing to buy back stock, while its peers raise debt against AI collateral, is the kind of contrast traders price. Share count reduction lifts earnings per share mechanically, which matters with valuation multiples this stretched.
Concentration risk remains the counterweight. Roughly 80 percent of high-performance AI accelerators still come from TSMC and Samsung fabs, and the geopolitical exposure behind that cannot be hedged by a repurchase. Nor does the authorization answer whether demand for AI compute keeps pace with what hyperscalers and newly public data center operators are committing to build through the decade.
Japanese markets gave the buyback cycle an indirect endorsement this week. The Nikkei rallied to cross 70,000 briefly on Monday, its first touch of that level since July, led by Advantest, Tokyo Electron and SoftBank Group. Traders noted that a $150 billion buyback from Nvidia supports expectations for chipmaker earnings worldwide, since it signals management confidence in data center demand. The index ended the session up 2.3 percent near 69,888.
Third quarter results are due in a few weeks. Consensus expects Nvidia to report revenue around $108 billion for the quarter ending in October, a 12 percent gain from the prior period, which would be another record for the company. That report lands soon after the buyback becomes spendable, and it may decide whether the pace stays at $40 billion a year or accelerates into the new authorization immediately.
The arithmetic of the program itself gives a rough read. At last fiscal year’s pace of about $40 billion a year, the $235 billion would take nearly six years to finish. At the first-half fiscal 2027 pace of $39 billion per half, it compresses to roughly three. Either path shrinks the share count faster than most large companies have ever managed, and both depend on cash generation holding up through the cycle.
From spending to returning
What is clear is that the decision marks a turn. Nvidia spent the past three years converting data center demand into earnings and reserve balances. The next phase, from fiscal 2028 onward, will test whether the company’s confidence in the cycle justifies turning part of that cash into a permanent raise in its shareholder return program. The prior frame treats this as the most shareholder-friendly move among large-cap technology companies this year, ahead of both Apple and Microsoft, and sets a benchmark the next few quarters will be measured against.