Prof G Markets · Sep 29, 2026
With Gil Luria, Managing Director and Head of Technology Research at D.A. Davidson
Nvidia's board has approved another $150 billion of stock buybacks, the largest buyback increase on record, while the shares trade at less than 17 times forward earnings. AMD trades at 40 times and Intel at 60 times, according to Gil Luria.
Luria said the market has decided the growth cycle is almost over for the biggest chip companies while it lasts for the smaller ones. He called that view internally inconsistent, and said a 17 multiple asks very little of a company still growing 70% a year.
"If you believe that the AI compute cycle is going to continue and we're going to build more data centers because the AI products are going to be better and we're going to use them more, then there's very hard to imagine a world where Nvidia doesn't have the biggest profit pool of any of these companies."
Gil Luria, Managing Director and Head of Technology Research at D.A. Davidson, on Prof G Markets, leads the firm's research on technology companies and returned to the show for this segment. In this interview he also covered the excesses in the AI build-out, the fight over who is responsible for AI agents that went rogue, and Meta's new enterprise push.
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Key Takeaways
Nvidia still has about $200 billion left over after funding its own business and its investments across the AI industry, Luria said
At 17x earnings, the market is pricing Nvidia to grow slower than the average company over the next three to five years
He called that "a fairly easy hurdle" for a company growing 70% plus
The market is of two minds on chips: the biggest names are priced for the end of the cycle, smaller ones for more of it
Nvidia gave guidance a year out for the first time last quarter, which Luria read as more confidence, not less
CoreWeave borrows at 9% to generate a 1% return, and he said a company does not grow its way out of that
The responsibility for the rogue AI agents lies with OpenAI and Anthropic, not with the models or the government, he said
Meta answered the question investors asked at earnings: a consumer assistant, Muse, and an enterprise business run by MongoDB's former CEO
1. A $150B Buyback
The host opened with the numbers. He said Nvidia's board had approved another $150 billion in buybacks, bringing the total it can spend repurchasing shares to $235 billion, and that Nvidia expects to deploy all of it in the next 16 months. He said that beats Apple's previous record of $110 billion in 2024. The stock closed up 1.5% on the news and is up about 21% for 2026, behind the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, which he said is up more than 75% this year.
The buyback is what is left after everything else
Asked whether $150 billion is bullish or bearish, Luria said it shows confidence, and described how Nvidia ranks the uses of its cash. Designing and selling chips does not take much capital. After that comes the money chief executive Jensen Huang is investing across the industry: in AI model companies, in neoclouds (data-center operators that rent out AI computing capacity), in optical companies, in Hugging Face for open-source AI, and in the safety measures Nvidia announced that day.
"And you still have 200 billion dollars left over." — Gil Luria
He said Nvidia's chief financial officer then looks at a stock trading at 17 times earnings and asks what buying it back would return to shareholders. His answer was that the return is very good, so most of the cash will go to the buyback.
