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The tech behemoth and chipmaker Nvidia on Monday announced the largest-ever stock buyback increase in US corporate history as its profits continue to explode due to massive spending on artificial intelligence data centers, which have drawn increasingly intense grassroots opposition nationwide.
Nvidia said its board “has authorized an additional $150 billion under the company’s existing share repurchase program, increasing the total remaining amount authorized to $235 billion.” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO and the eighth-richest person in the world, said his company’s “growth is being driven by a once-in-a-generation platform shift to AI and accelerated computing,” adding that Nvidia’s “cash generation gives us the capacity to invest in the technologies that advance this transformation and return capital to shareholders.”
Stock buybacks reduce the number of a company’s shares outstanding on the public market and boosts earnings per share, typically resulting in a stock price increase and a wealth boost for shareholders and executives who receive stock-based compensation. Nvidia’s stock price jumped by around 3% following Monday’s announcement.
Critics argue that corporate spending on share repurchases amounts to stock price manipulation that diverts resources from more productive uses of capital, such as increasing worker pay and research and development. Buybacks, which were effectively illegal until 1982, have surged to record levels in recent years, fueled by massive tax cuts that President Donald Trump signed into law during his first White House term.
“The huge tax cuts corporations received from the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law — which were supposed to be used to increase employee pay and business investment — have instead been wasted on trillions of dollars of stock buybacks,” David Kass, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, said in June. “Stock buybacks widen economic inequality by making already wealthy shareholders even richer.”
The Financial Times noted that Nvidia’s buyback increase “beats Apple’s record $110 billion, set in 2024, for the largest in US corporate history.”
Nvidia is one of the chief beneficiaries of the AI data center boom that has sparked protests and sustained, bipartisan opposition across the US.
“Nvidia’s chips are the centerpiece of giant AI data centers, and demand for those chips has become a barometer of the AI boom,” The New York Times reported last month. “Other technology companies have been buying tens of billions of dollars’ worth of those chips, making Nvidia the most valuable public company in the world, with a market capitalization of about $5 trillion.”
Nvidia’s profits more than doubled in the second quarter of 2026 compared to the previous year, surging to nearly $60 billion.
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