On the evening of September 28, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) announced it will launch the largest stock buyback program in US corporate history, totaling $150 billion.
Unprecedented scale
The world's most valuable company said its board has approved an increase of $150 billion to its existing buyback authorization. This exceeds the $110 billion record set by Apple in 2024, making it the largest buyback authorization ever in US corporate history. With this addition, NVIDIA has $235 billion remaining available for buybacks, which the company expects to use through its fiscal year 2028.
Cash generation keeps growing
As demand for AI training and inference surges, NVIDIA's cash generation capacity continues to strengthen. Following the news, the stock jumped in premarket trading, rising more than 2%. The current stock price corresponds to a forward P/E of about 16.5 times for the next twelve months — the lowest level since January 2015 and well below the average of roughly 30 times over the past 15 years.
Some analysts believe this may reflect market expectations that NVIDIA's future profit growth will slow. Last month, NVIDIA projected revenue growth of about 70% for fiscal 2028. That forecast helped ease investor concerns to some extent — after years of explosive growth, the market has been questioning how long the AI spending boom can last.
Jensen Huang said: "NVIDIA's growth is being driven by a once-in-a-generation platform shift — AI and accelerated computing. Our cash generation ability allows us to both invest in the technologies driving this transformation and return capital to shareholders."
What buybacks signal
Large buyback authorizations typically mean management believes its own stock is undervalued. However, for large, mature companies, large-scale capital returns are often associated with slowing growth. When Apple announced its $110 billion buyback in 2024, according to data, the five largest buyback authorizations in US corporate history all came from Apple. At the time, iPhone growth had already begun to slow, but thanks to its dominance in the smartphone market, Apple could still generate enormous profits.
By contrast, NVIDIA's sales are still growing rapidly. The market expects its revenue to grow about 90% this year. Several heavyweights in the AI race — including OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX — are major customers of NVIDIA. Even Google, which has its own AI chip line, purchases NVIDIA products in large volumes through its cloud business.
Profit outlook
In the most recent fiscal year ended in January, NVIDIA generated nearly $100 billion in free cash flow. According to consensus forecasts compiled by Visible Alpha under S&P Global, that figure is expected to more than triple to $329 billion by fiscal 2028. Visible Alpha data shows NVIDIA's net profit this fiscal year is expected to more than double to $245 billion, and in the next fiscal year ending January 2028, net profit is projected to rise further to $387 billion.
New AI security system
In addition, NVIDIA launched a new AI security system that runs on its hardware. The company said that if the system had been in use at the time, it could have stopped the attack on Hugging Face. The system includes two open-source software security tools, mainly used to control in real time the range of resources AI agents can access.
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