All of the big tech companies have long been cash geysers. But the rate at which Nvidia’s cash production has exploded in the past couple of years is on a whole different level than other companies have experienced. And that’s raising questions about how Nvidia will spend its fast-expanding cash pile.

Nvidia’s free cash flow has mushroomed from $3.8 billion in the year to January 2023 to an estimated $96.5 billion in the year ending this coming January, a period when its sale of specialized chips for AI took off. That revenue growth represents a compound annual growth rate of 194%. A scan of the biggest tech firms’ financial history going back to 1990 suggests that’s a faster rate of growth than any experienced during any three-year period in that time. The only period that comes close is Apple’s takeoff in the years immediately after it introduced the iPod in 2001. (See chart above).