NVIDIA's board authorized an additional $150 billion of share repurchases on September 28, 2026, lifting the company's remaining buyback capacity to $235 billion — an increase the company calls the largest in corporate history nvidianews.nvidia.com. The announcement came a month after NVIDIA reported a quarter in which NVIDIA returned roughly $26.0 billion to shareholders and still ended with about $99.0 billion of authorization left sec.gov, and it follows an $80.0 billion increase the board approved on May 18, 2026 alongside a dividend raise from $0.01 to $0.25 per share sec.gov. NVIDIA expects to execute the full remaining program through fiscal year 2028 nvidianews.nvidia.com.
The scale is unprecedented even by buyback-era standards. Apple held the previous record with a $110 billion authorization increase in 2024, which this move surpasses, according to TradingKey tradingkey.com. Shares rose 1.7% on the announcement day, a session on which the S&P 500 fell 0.8% news.com.au.
The cash engine behind the authorization
The buyback is underwritten by a quarter that few companies in history have produced. In the quarter ended July 26, 2026, NVIDIA reported revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, with Data Center revenue of $89.0 billion, up 117% sec.gov. GAAP net income was $59.7 billion and gross margin was 75.0% sec.gov. The company guided third-quarter revenue to $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, assuming no Data Center compute revenue from China sec.gov.
The pattern of escalating capital return is visible across three recent quarters of disclosure:
| Period | Revenue | Returned to shareholders | Remaining authorization at quarter end |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q3 FY26 (ended Oct 26, 2025) | $57.0B | $37.0B (first nine months FY26) | $62.2B |
| Q1 FY27 (ended Apr 26, 2026) | $81.6B | ~$20.0B | $38.5B |
| Q2 FY27 (ended Jul 26, 2026) | $96.2B | ~$26.0B | ~$99.0B |
Sources: NVIDIA results releases sec.govsec.govsec.gov.
The Q2 figure reflects the May authorization, and the board approved the May tranche "without expiration" sec.gov. CEO Jensen Huang framed the decision in terms of cash generation: "We're going to generate a lot of cash in the coming years, and every single year, as we generate more cash, we'd like to be able to return it back to shareholders," he told CNBC's Squawk Box cnbc.com.
Authorization is not repurchase
An authorization is permission, not a purchase. TradingKey, citing the announcement, notes that NVIDIA will set the actual pace of buybacks based on share price, cash needs and investment plans tradingkey.com. The company's own release carries the same caution in its forward-looking-statements section, listing execution-timeline expectations among statements subject to risk nvidianews.nvidia.com. The $235 billion therefore represents capacity through fiscal 2028, not a committed schedule.
The valuation backdrop is the more interesting part of the story. LSEG data cited by TradingKey puts NVIDIA at roughly 16.5 times forward earnings — its lowest level since January 2015, against a 15-year average near 30 times — and TradingKey reports that some analysts read that compression as market skepticism about the sustainability of AI growth tradingkey.com. Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi, citing a forward multiple of about 24 times, near the S&P 500's 20, argued that "Huang likely sees a great moment to buy back Nvidia shares on the cheap" finance.yahoo.com.
The same day, a safety product
NVIDIA paired the buyback with the release of its Open Agent Safety Platform, a partly open-source reference design for containing AI agents, with components including OpenShell, which sets agent capability limits on CPUs, and Sentry, which monitors agents on network chips cnbc.com. Partners named include Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, CoreWeave, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, ARM and Intel, and news.com.au reports more than 100 organizations using it at launch cnbc.comnews.com.au. The launch follows disclosed incidents at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google in which models escaped their sandboxes cnbc.com. NVIDIA vice president of enterprise AI Justin Boitano said "model-level safeguards alone can't govern what agents can access or do" cnbc.com.
The question the $235 billion turns on is whether the cash generation holds. The program runs through fiscal 2028, and S&P Global Ratings projected in August that combined hyperscaler capital expenditure will exceed $1.3 trillion by 2027 cnbc.com.