Nvidia’s board added 150 billion dollars to its share repurchase authorisation on 28 September, lifting the remaining capacity to 235 billion dollars and taking the record for the largest single increase away from Apple’s 110 billion in 2024. The company expects to work through the programme by fiscal 2028. It had already added 80 billion in May.
The headline number is enormous. The 150 billion addition alone is bigger than the market value of roughly 84 per cent of the companies in the S&P 500.
The number underneath it is more interesting. Nvidia was trading at about 16.5 times twelve-month forward earnings, the lowest multiple since January 2015 and well under its fifteen year average of about 30. This is a company that last reported quarterly revenue of 96.2 billion dollars, up 106 per cent on the year, guided the current quarter to around 108 billion, and forecast roughly 70 per cent revenue growth for fiscal 2028 against a Wall Street expectation nearer 44 per cent.
So the arithmetic in front of everyone is a business growing at a triple-digit rate priced as though the growth is nearly over.
A buyback at that moment is not financial engineering. It is a position. Jensen Huang’s framing is that cash generation gives the company room to both invest in the technology and return capital, and that the authorisation reflects confidence in the opportunity ahead. Translated out of the register of the press release: you are selling our shares at sixteen times, we think that is wrong, and we have 235 billion dollars with which to disagree with you.
Anyone who has run a small business through a soft patch knows this instinct in a much smaller denomination. The street goes quiet, the landlord next door drops his asking rent, the second-hand espresso machine you have wanted for three years appears at half price because the cafe two doors down is closing. Everyone else is reading the quiet as a verdict. You read it as a price. The question is never whether the mood is bad. The question is whether the mood is correct.
The caution worth stating is that a buyback is only a good trade if the company is right about itself, and an enormous one makes the bet unignorable. Nvidia is choosing to spend on its own equity in the same window that competitive pressure from AMD, Intel and custom silicon is the thing the sceptics point at. If the pricing power holds, the repurchases will look like the cheapest capital the company ever deployed. If it does not, the money is gone and the shares are still cheap.
There is also a wider signal in the timing. Buybacks across the market fell roughly 50 per cent from July through late September. Corporate America was pulling its horns in. Nvidia moved in the opposite direction in the same fortnight, which is either confidence or a very expensive way of insisting on it.
The most valuable company in the world has looked at its own price and decided it is a bargain.
Somebody is wrong, and they have put a number on it.
Source: CTV News, “Nvidia boosts share buyback by record US$150B as AI boom fuels growth”
