Greg Abel, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, speaks during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, NE, on May 2, 2026. Greg Abel, CEO of CNBC Berkshire Hathaway, discussed with CNBC’s Becky Quick on Wednesday the conglomerate’s massive investment in Google parent Alphabet, calling the tech giant a “major player” in artificial intelligence. Abel said Berkshire has a clear view of the impacts AI is having across its portfolio of companies, and that Google’s position relative to the emerging technology is strong. “We have a lot of visibility within our companies about how we use AI, what kind of benefits it offers, so it generated incremental interest, and then we saw Google as a major player,” he told Quick. Berkshire acquired a $10 billion stake in Google 15 months ago at a 6.5% discount, Abel said. “They had not established the size, but they recommended that we consider 10 billion. And “Warren and I discussed the size of the discount and I recommended a six and a half percent discount, and we were comfortable with that,” Abel said. “Then he finally consummated the transaction.” Berkshire added a total of $17 billion in Alphabet shares in the second quarter, making it the third-largest holding in Berkshire Hathaway’s stock portfolio, according to the summary of the company’s second-quarter portfolio filed with the SEC in August. Alphabet’s purchases were the biggest addition to Berkshire’s portfolio of the quarter, but Berkshire also bet big on Delta Air Lines, increasing that position by 44%, or about $1.6 billion. Google is one of five so-called hyperscalers executing huge capital expenditures to expand its computing power to run AI, along with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Oracle. Global hyperscaler capital spending for 2026 is estimated at around $1 trillion, according to investment bank Goldman Sachs, but there is significant variation within estimates. “Estimates indicate that the commonly cited forecast for hyperscaler capital spending of $794 billion likely underestimates the total amount of global capital spending on AI by around $200 billion. At the same time, the $794 billion figure likely overstates the amount of U.S. investment in AI by $200 billion,” Goldman Sachs researchers wrote in an August research analysis. The question for investors is to what extent these huge investments will pay off and in what time frame. AI computing workloads generally fall into two categories of algorithmic training based on large data sets and inference, or query answering. Miss a moment’s most trusted name in news from business.
