Berkshire Hathaway has deepened its bet on Alphabet, taking part in a $10 billion private placement after first building a position in the third quarter of 2025 and then adding more shares in the first quarter of 2026. The move helped make Alphabet one of Berkshire Hathaway's largest holdings, and it comes as Alphabet raises $80 billion to fund its artificial intelligence ambitions.
The timing matters because Greg Abel, who is set to lead Berkshire Hathaway after Warren Buffett, appears to be leaning into a company some investors once feared would be hurt by AI chatbots. Instead, Alphabet has used AI to improve its search engine, while its Google Cloud business has kept growing much faster than the rest of the company. That helps explain why the stock has roughly doubled over the past 12 months since the start of the third quarter of 2025.
Alphabet still sits on a wide base of businesses that give it staying power. It dominates digital advertising through Google and YouTube, and its cloud unit is one of the Big Three in that market. The search business also benefits from network effects: the more people use it, the more data it collects to refine results and strengthen the product. In a U.S. market where e-commerce accounted for 16.9% of retail transactions in the first quarter, that scale matters because search remains a central route to commerce and discovery.
Berkshire Hathaway's size in Alphabet also fits its style. The company has long preferred big, durable businesses it can own for years, not quarters, and Alphabet now looks like one of those rare positions that bridges old and new economy logic. Even so, the open question is how far Berkshire Hathaway will go from here. The firm has already increased its stake twice in less than a year, but it has not said how much more Alphabet stock it may buy.
For now, the message is clear: Greg Abel's Berkshire Hathaway is not treating Artificial Intelligence as a threat to avoid, but as a force that can strengthen one of the market's most dominant companies. Whether that leads to still more buying will be the next test of how large a conviction this has become.
