Nvidia said on 28 September that it would spend another US$150 billion buying back its own shares, adding to what it said was the largest repurchase in history, as the chip company continues to cash in on a global race to dominate artificial intelligence.
The increase comes four months after Nvidia added US$80 billion to the programme, and brings the total remaining amount authorised to US$235 billion.
"Nvidia's growth is being driven by a once-in-a-generation platform shift to AI and accelerated computing," Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, said in a statement.
"Our cash generation gives us the capacity to invest in the technologies that advance this transformation and return capital to shareholders," he added. "This authorisation reflects our confidence in the long-term opportunity ahead."
Share buybacks are viewed as a way to reward investors, including executives and employees, because they can potentially lift a company's stock price by limiting the supply of its shares available for sale. They also remove excess cash from the balance sheet.
The scale is without precedent even by the standards of the largest listed companies. Apple authorised a US$110 billion repurchase in 2024.
Nvidia's stock rose nearly 4 per cent on 28 September. The company is the most valuable listed business in the world, with a market capitalisation of about US$5.6 trillion, built on chips that other companies are buying in enormous quantities to train and run AI systems.
The buyback follows an August report in which the company said revenue had more than doubled, to US$96.22 billion, for the quarter that ended in July. Nvidia told investors that projected revenue in the current quarter would rise 90 per cent from 2025, to US$108 billion. Just three years ago, in 2023, quarterly profit was US$6.2 billion.
Nvidia has also been spending outside its own share register. In September it agreed to pay US$12.9 billion for Hugging Face, and on 28 September it introduced open-source software to monitor and control the actions of AI agents, which can carry out tasks by themselves.
Some observers have criticised the wider AI ecosystem for the appearance of a financial bubble. The repurchase brings Nvidia closer in line with more mature companies that routinely return cash to shareholders.
It is worth restating what a buyback is, in the flattest available terms, because the flattest terms are the ones that cause the difficulty. A share repurchase is a transaction in which a company is the buyer and the asset is the company.
On that description Nvidia has now committed US$235 billion to acquiring Nvidia. This newspaper has been unable to identify any larger single commitment by any buyer to that particular asset, which makes Nvidia the dominant customer in the Nvidia market by a considerable margin.
It is also, necessarily, the seller's issuer. Demand for Nvidia shares is at present being supplied in very substantial part by Nvidia, which is a degree of vertical integration rarely achieved outside the raw materials industries.
Analysts have spent three years asking who will keep buying Nvidia at these volumes once the initial build-out of AI data centres slows. The company has answered the question in the only way genuinely within its control.
The statement notes that the authorisation reflects confidence in the long-term opportunity ahead. The Department of Unnecessary Research agrees, and observes that the long-term opportunity in question is a market in which Nvidia is the supplier, the customer and the product.