Nvidia's record buyback shows chipmaker's stock is too cheap for CEO Huang to resist

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the G20 Innovation Ministerial on September 2, 2026 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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When Nvidia announced a record stock buyback on Monday, the chipmaker's share price was, by one key metric, at its cheapest level in a decade. CEO Jensen Huang saw it as a bargain.

Nvidia's price-to-earnings ratio for fiscal 2028, which begins this coming February, sits at just 14.5, below all of its megacap peers other than Micron. Its average current P/E ratio over the past five years is 62.9, more than double where it is today.

The constricted multiples for the world's most valuable company, now valued at over $5.5 trillion, reflect the sustained historic rate of profitability growth for the chipmaker powering the artificial intelligence boom. The stock is up 23% this year, topping the Nasdaq, but it's not keeping up with expected earnings growth.

Analysts on average expect Nvidia to hit net income of close to $385 billion in fiscal 2028, up 60% from the prior year and more than fivefold over a three-year stretch.

So on Monday, Nvidia said it's authorized an additional $150 billion to its share buyback program. That's on top of an $80 billion repurchase plan announced in May, when the company also boosted its quarterly cash dividend to 25 cents per share from 1 cent.

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The latest buyback is a "clear-cut message" that management thinks its stock is undervalued, said Karan Ramchandani, managing director at Post Oak Group, in an interview.

"If you look at the P/E ratio, the earnings are are scaling up faster than the share price," Ramchandani said. "It's a very healthy mark of a company looking at their own stock buybacks as the best investment they could do in the coming year."

The stock rose almost 2% on Monday, when the company also announced new software and hardware solutions to control AI agents.

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