Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, and Nvidia spent $1.1 trillion on share buybacks in 5 years to pump up their shares. That’s at risk.
One of the big drivers of the surge of stock prices over the past many years has been the prodigious amount of corporate cash spent on share buybacks by Big Tech and other companies. Some of the share buybacks were funded from cash flow, some with borrowed money. Share buybacks are not like stock trading; they represent new money entering the stock market to remove shares from the stock market. Their purpose is to drive up the price of the remaining shares.
For example, from Q3 2020 through Q3 2025, six companies – Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOG)(GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL), Meta (META), and Nvidia (NVDA) – spent $1.1 trillion on share buybacks (data via YCharts). These are amounts actually spent on share buybacks, not the announcements of future share buyback plans.
I’m leaving out Amazon for a reason: It already stopped share buybacks in 2022 to spend that cash on capital expenditures, such as AI infrastructure. And others may have to follow. More in a moment.
Apple topped the list with $437 billion in share buybacks over those five years, followed by Alphabet ($281 billion), Meta ($151 billion), Microsoft ($107 billion), and Nvidia ($87 billion). But Nvidia’s buyback program was ramped up in 2024; and over the past four quarters, Nvidia spent $43 billion on share buybacks.
Some of these share buybacks were funded with borrowed money by issuing bonds. And it shows on their balance sheets: Apple now has $112 billion in short-term and long-term debt, Microsoft $120 billion, Meta $50 billion, Alphabet $30 billion.
These companies are now engaged in an AI-spending war, on the premise that whoever spends the most wins?
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