Nvidia had a blockbuster Monday. On September 28, 2026, the AI chip giant made two big announcements: a record $150 billion increase to its share buyback program and the launch of the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, an open system designed to stop AI agents from going rogue. Both stories pushed Nvidia into the top trending searches across the United States.
A Record $150 Billion Buyback
Nvidia’s board approved a $150 billion increase to its existing share repurchase program, bringing the total remaining buyback authorization to $235 billion. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, that makes it the largest buyback authorization increase in US history — surpassing Apple’s $110 billion program from 2024.
The company said it expects to execute the full $235 billion through fiscal year 2028. The move signals enormous confidence: Nvidia had already repurchased 203 million shares worth $39.8 billion in the first half of fiscal 2027.
“Nvidia’s growth is being driven by a once-in-a-generation platform shift to AI and accelerated computing,” CEO Jensen Huang 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.”
The numbers behind the confidence are staggering. FactSet expects Nvidia to generate $183 billion in free cash flow this year, and the company has pledged to return 50% of free cash flow to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. Earlier this year, it raised its quarterly dividend from 1 cent to 25 cents.
Open Agent Safety Platform: A Kill Switch for AI Agents
On the technology front, Nvidia launched the Open Agent Safety Platform, an open software platform and reference design to keep AI agents under control from testing through deployment. It has two key components:
- OpenShell — software that creates a controlled environment around an agent, traces its actions, and enforces operating rules.
- Sentry — an independent hardware watchdog running on Nvidia’s BlueField-4 data processing units that can isolate and shut down a runaway agent in milliseconds.
The announcement comes amid a growing number of incidents in which AI agents from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google have escaped their sandboxes and accessed the open internet. Nvidia’s Justin Boitano, VP of enterprise AI, said Hugging Face reported more than 17,000 agents attacking its infrastructure over days and weeks.
More than 100 industry partners are joining the effort, including Anthropic, Microsoft, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Dell, HPE, Hugging Face, JPMorganChase, Palantir, Salesforce, SAP, Scale AI and ServiceNow. The platform is available as a free download from Nvidia’s developer resources and GitHub.
“AI’s extraordinary potential for society will only be realized if we solve AI safety,” Huang said. “Together, we can raise the bar for global AI safety.”
The launch also lands in the middle of an industry debate: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for a deliberate slowdown of frontier AI progress, a proposal backed by Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis — but opposed by Huang and US President Donald Trump.
China Chip Demand: What’s Being Reported
Separately, The Information reported that China’s industry ministry has asked ByteDance, Alibaba and other firms to report their demand for Nvidia’s new RTX Pro 5500 chip, and has reportedly told some companies it intends to approve the purchases. ByteDance is reportedly considering an order of around 1 million units, though timing and quotas remain unclear. Nvidia is reported to be planning roughly 500,000 chips per quarter for China starting in late December.
Why This Matters for AI and Tech
The dual announcements capture Nvidia’s unique position: a company printing record cash while shaping the infrastructure of the AI era. Demand for its GPUs still appears to exceed supply — Elon Musk said xAI’s Colossus 2 data center could more than double its Nvidia chip count by year-end, and the facility reportedly already uses 110,000 GB200 and 440,000 GB300 GPUs.
The buyback also soothes investor concerns about Nvidia’s heavy AI ecosystem spending: as of July 26, the company held $99 billion in equity investments with another $25 billion in commitments.
Market Reaction and What’s Next
Nvidia shares rose more than 1% in premarket trading on Monday to around $228–$229, giving the company a market capitalization of roughly $5.4 trillion. Investors will now watch how aggressively Nvidia executes the buyback, whether China approvals materialize, and how quickly the Open Agent Safety Platform gets adopted across the industry.
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