Nvidia adds $150B to a buyback that needs twice its current pace

Nvidia’s board authorized another $150 billion of share buybacks on Monday, and the company’s own quarterly filing shows what that commits it to. Nvidia repurchased $19.7 billion of stock in its most recent reported quarter. Finishing the $235 billion now authorized by the end of fiscal 2028 works out at roughly $44 billion a quarter, by our calculation, which is more than double the pace it has actually managed.

The announcement itself runs to three short paragraphs. It says the board approved an additional $150 billion under the existing repurchase program, taking the total remaining authorization to $235 billion, and calls that the largest such increase in history. The one operational detail is the deadline: Nvidia “expects to execute the total remaining program through fiscal year 2028”.

But that deadline is closer than it sounds. Nvidia’s 10-Q for the quarter ended 26 July 2026 says its fiscal years end on the last Sunday in January, so fiscal 2028 closes about 16 months after Monday’s press release. Spread $235 billion across those five and a bit quarters and you get the $44 billion figure. The same filing records $19.7 billion of repurchases in the quarter, covering 94.4 million shares at an average of $202.40 to $214.32 a share depending on the month.

Work the arithmetic backwards and a second number nobody has printed falls out. The 10-Q put the remaining authorization at $99.3 billion as of 26 July. If $235 billion is the total after adding $150 billion, then $85 billion was left immediately before, so Nvidia used about $14.3 billion of authorization in the two months between the quarter closing and Monday. That’s roughly the run rate the filing already showed, not an acceleration.

Item	Figure	Where it comes from
Repurchased in Q2 fiscal 2027	$19.7bn (94.4m shares)	Form 10-Q
Authorization left, 26 Jul 2026	$99.3bn	Form 10-Q
Added on 28 Sep 2026	$150bn	Press release
Total remaining now	$235bn	Press release
Implied left before the increase	$85bn	Our calculation
Used since the quarter closed	about $14.3bn	Our calculation
Quarterly pace needed to fiscal 2028	about $44bn	Our calculation

Our cash generation gives us the capacity to invest in the technologies that advance this transformation and return capital to shareholders.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA, in the press release

Huang put the case more plainly on television. “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” on Monday. CNBC put the shares up 2.8% that day and the market capitalisation at $5.42 trillion. The cash is real enough: the balance sheet in the 10-Q shows $22.4 billion in cash and equivalents plus $76.9 billion of marketable debt and equity securities, which is the $99 billion Business Insider cited.

One widely repeated detail is wrong, though. Business Insider reported that Nvidia raised its quarterly dividend from a penny to 25 cents “last week”. The 10-Q, filed on 26 August, says the increase from $0.01 to $0.25 happened on 18 May 2026, four months before the buyback news. The same filing shows Nvidia paid $6.0 billion of dividends in the quarter, so the buyback is by far the larger channel.

That correction aside, the scale is the part everyone agreed on. Business Insider notes Apple held the previous record with a $110 billion authorization in 2024, and SiliconANGLE ties the decision to Nvidia’s revenue growth and the performance of its startup investments. Semafor makes the sharper comparison: Alphabet bought back $45 billion of its own stock in 2025 and none this year, because it’s funding AI projects instead. Nvidia is claiming it doesn’t have to choose, which is easier when you’re selling the infrastructure rather than buying it.

The obvious objection is that the cash has other places to go, because Nvidia has committed a lot of it elsewhere. It has already built a $99 billion equity portfolio in its own customers and suppliers, and the same 10-Q discloses guarantees capped at $105 billion on OpenAI data centre leases in Ohio. It also named $33.5 billion of senior notes as a risk factor. Buying back $44 billion of stock a quarter on top of that is a different proposition from buying back $20 billion.

So Nvidia gives itself room in the filing, which says the program “may be suspended at any time at our discretion” and is subject to market conditions and other investment opportunities. So the $235 billion is a ceiling, not a schedule. What to watch is the third-quarter 10-Q, due in November, because that filing carries the monthly repurchase table, which is the first public check on whether the pace moved at all. The company has projected 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028, and the buyback maths only works if that lands.