Billionaire Jensen Huang's Nvidia approves a record $150 billion share buyback

Nvidia authorised another $150 billion of share repurchases on Monday, Sept. 28, the largest single increase to a buyback programme any company has ever announced.

It beats the $110 billion Apple added in 2024. The new authorisation takes Nvidia's remaining capacity to $235 billion, which the company expects to spend by the end of its 2028 financial year.

A buyback is a company using its own cash to purchase its own shares on the open market. Each share bought is retired, which leaves fewer in circulation and raises the earnings attributable to every remaining one. It is the main alternative to paying a dividend.

Jensen Huang tied the decision to demand. Nvidia's growth is being driven by a once-in-a-generation platform shift to artificial intelligence and accelerated computing, the chief executive said, and the cash that generates gives the company capacity both to invest in the technologies behind that shift and to return money to shareholders.

The scale of what it already returns is easy to miss. Nvidia repurchased 108 million shares for $20.2 billion in the first quarter of its current financial year and 94 million for $19.7 billion in the second, and paid $6.3 billion in dividends across the half. It raised the quarterly dividend from one cent a share to 25 cents in May, a twenty-five-fold increase.

The authorisations have been rising in steps. The board approved $60 billion last August, $80 billion in May, and now $150 billion, which is larger than both of the previous two combined.

Buying its own shares at this level is a statement about price. Nvidia shares have gained about 24% over the past twelve months and rose 3.4% on Monday, giving the company a market value of $5.42 trillion, and management is choosing to spend $235 billion on stock at those levels rather than hold the cash.

What sits behind the confidence is the revenue line. Nvidia reported record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion in May, up 85% from a year earlier, with data centre revenue of $75.2 billion, and last month forecast roughly 70% growth for its 2028 financial year. That guidance answered investors who had begun asking how long the spending surge could last.

Its customers keep committing more. Combined capital expenditure by the largest cloud computing providers is projected to exceed $1.3 trillion by 2027, and almost all of the chips that money buys come from Nvidia.

Not everyone is comfortable with how some of that demand arises. Nvidia has been investing in artificial intelligence startups and cloud providers, and some investors have questioned whether funding its own customers indirectly props up orders for its chips.

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and owns roughly 3% of it, a stake that has made him one of the wealthiest people in the world. He said this month that he would gladly pay about $8 billion under California's proposed one-time tax on billionaires, calling it a privilege.