Nvidia's $150 billion buyback: finishing it by fiscal 2028 means about $43 billion a quarter, twice its current pace

Nvidia's board has approved another $150 billion for share repurchases, lifting the total remaining authorization to $235 billion, the company said Monday. Investing.com, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times all called it a record in their headlines. The stock was $229.86 in premarket trading at 8:54 a.m. ET, up 2.1% from Friday's $225.07 close, according to Nasdaq.com.

The headline figure is $150 billion. The more useful figure is the one sentence of guidance in the release: Nvidia "expects to execute the total remaining program through fiscal year 2028." Nvidia's fiscal 2028 ends in late January 2028, about five and a half quarters from now.

The pace the release implies

Spreading $235 billion over roughly 5.5 quarters works out to about $43 billion a quarter (our calculation). Here is what Nvidia has actually been spending, from its filings:

So the plan implies roughly doubling the buyback rate from the last two quarters, which had already doubled from last year. The 10-Q shows $99.3 billion was still authorized on July 26. Since the new total is $235 billion rather than $249.3 billion, about $14.3 billion appears to have been used between late July and Monday, a pace close to the second quarter's.

Can the cash flow carry it

In the first half of fiscal 2027, Nvidia generated $74.4 billion of operating cash flow and spent $4.4 billion on property and equipment, leaving about $70 billion of free cash flow, or roughly $35 billion a quarter. It paid $6.0 billion of dividends in the second quarter alone. A $43 billion quarterly buyback plus a dividend of that size comes to about $49 billion, so meeting the timetable from cash flow alone would need quarterly free cash flow roughly 40% above the first-half average, or a draw on the balance sheet. Nvidia held $22.4 billion of cash and equivalents at July 26, before counting marketable securities.

That is arithmetic, not a forecast. A repurchase authorization is permission, not an obligation, and companies often run behind their stated pace.

What it means for the share count

At Monday's premarket price, $235 billion would buy about 1.02 billion shares, or about 4.2% of the roughly 24.1 billion shares Nvidia reported outstanding in August (our calculation). Against the $5.54 trillion market value Nasdaq.com shows, the new $150 billion is about 2.7% of the company. Stock-based pay offsets part of any reduction: Nvidia recorded $3.95 billion of share-based compensation in the first half. The reported share count has fallen from about 24.3 billion in February to 24.1 billion in August, so buybacks have been shrinking it, slowly.

What traders will watch: the third-quarter 10-Q, which will show whether repurchases step up toward the implied rate, and whether free cash flow rises enough to fund it without eating into cash. Nvidia also released a software platform Monday aimed at keeping AI agents from misbehaving, which Reuters and Bloomberg covered separately. Background: what is going on with Nvidia stock and this morning's before the bell.

Sources: NVIDIA; NVIDIA Form 10-Q and 10-K via SEC EDGAR; Nasdaq.com; Investing.com. Pace, cash-flow and share-count figures are our calculations from company filings. This is market information, not investment advice.