Nvidia boosts its stock buyback by $150 billion, the largest single authorization ever

Nvidia authorized an additional $150 billion in share repurchases, pushing its total remaining buyback capacity to $235 billion. The company expects to use that authorization through fiscal 2028.

• The scale: $150 billion is more than the entire market capitalization of most S&P 500 companies, authorized in a single board decision.
• The timeline: Nvidia isn't required to spend it all at once. The company has flexibility on pacing through fiscal 2028.
• The reaction: Shares rose roughly 3% on the announcement, extending a year-to-date gain of about 24%.

CEO Jensen Huang tied the buyback directly to Nvidia's cash position rather than framing it as a defensive move.

"NVIDIA's growth is being driven by a once-in-a-generation platform shift to AI and accelerated computing," Huang said. "Our cash generation gives us the capacity to invest in the technologies that advance this transformation and return capital to shareholders. This authorization reflects our confidence in the long-term opportunity ahead."

Nvidia is positioning the buyback as proof it can fund massive AI infrastructure spending and reward shareholders simultaneously, rather than choosing between the two.

The size of this authorization only makes sense against how quickly Nvidia's buyback program has scaled alongside its AI business. In fiscal 2023, before the generative-AI boom fully took hold, Nvidia repurchased about $10 billion in stock. By fiscal 2025, that figure had jumped to roughly $34 billion for the year, covering 310 million shares.

The board has been topping up the authorization repeatedly to keep pace: a $25 billion increase in August 2023, a $50 billion increase in August 2024, and a $60 billion increase in August 2025. The new $150 billion authorization dwarfs all three combined, reflecting just how much more cash Nvidia now generates each quarter compared to even a year ago.

Huang's comments about "cash generation" aren't abstract. Nvidia's most recent quarterly results, for the second quarter of fiscal 2027, showed revenue of $96.2 billion, with data center revenue alone reaching $89 billion, up 117% year-over-year. That figure broke down into $48.7 billion from hyperscale cloud customers and $40.3 billion from AI cloud, industrial, and enterprise customers.

The scale of returns: in that same quarter, Nvidia already returned about $26 billion to shareholders through a combination of buybacks and dividends, before this new $150 billion authorization was even on the table. The company has guided third-quarter revenue to roughly $108 billion, meaning the cash available to fund both AI investment and buybacks is still climbing.

Nvidia's dual-track approach stands out against how at least one major AI rival is handling its own cash. Alphabet repurchased $45 billion in stock during 2025, then halted buybacks entirely this year, choosing instead to issue new shares to help fund its AI infrastructure buildout.

Why it matters: the contrast highlights how differently AI giants are managing the tension between funding compute-heavy growth and returning cash to shareholders. Nvidia's position, sitting at the center of AI chip supply with enormous margins, gives it room that companies building out their own data centers from scratch don't necessarily have.

CNBC's Jim Cramer, who has previously pushed for an even larger buyback, called the move significant but not quite as aggressive as he'd hoped.

"If they're active and in there every day, it will change the trajectory of the stock," Cramer said, noting the $150 billion figure fell short of the $500 billion he had called for. Even so, he described it as a major step in the right direction.

By the numbers: other analysts framed the buyback as a sign of confidence that could help stabilize the stock through periods of AI-sector volatility, with some describing the size of the authorization as unprecedented for any company, not just chipmakers.

Not every read on the buyback has been positive. AI critic Ed Zitron, host of the podcast "Better Offline," argued the timing says more about investor anxiety than confidence.

Zitron characterized the move as "an attempt to calm very nervous investors around AI," pointing to the broader backdrop of AI-bubble concerns circulating among analysts and financial media. The argument: a board authorizing a record buyback while AI-bubble talk intensifies could be read as management trying to manage sentiment as much as capital.

There's also a distributional argument critics have raised around large buybacks generally: gains from share repurchases tend to flow disproportionately to large shareholders and corporate insiders, rather than delivering the kind of broad-based benefit that new product revenue or dividends might spread more evenly across everyday investors holding shares through retirement accounts or index funds.

Buybacks work mechanically, not just symbolically. Every share Nvidia repurchases and retires shrinks the total share count, which means the same net income gets divided among fewer shares outstanding, mechanically lifting earnings per share even if profit itself doesn't grow.

The math: if Nvidia spends its entire $235 billion remaining authorization, some estimates suggest the share count could shrink by roughly 4%, a meaningful boost to per-share earnings on its own, independent of any revenue growth. Nvidia already bought back $39 billion in stock during just the first half of fiscal 2027, so the pace of execution has been substantial well before this latest authorization was even announced.

Retail interest is already high: retail investors bought roughly $562 million worth of Nvidia shares during a recent selloff, reportedly the largest such purchase since 2014, showing individual investors are already leaning into the stock even before the buyback's full effects on share count play out.

The buyback comes as Nvidia has become increasingly central to how the AI industry itself gets funded. The company has been involved in financing arrangements for chip purchases and has guaranteed data center leases tied to AI labs that aren't yet profitable, effectively acting as both a supplier and a financier within the AI ecosystem it depends on for growth.

That dual role adds context to the buyback decision. A company choosing to return cash to shareholders rather than plow every available dollar back into that financing ecosystem could be read as a sign of financial discipline, or, per critics like Zitron, as a quieter signal about how much further Nvidia wants to extend its own exposure to unprofitable AI customers.