Warren Buffett formally stepped down as Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman on September 18, ending more than five decades in the job and handing the nonexecutive chairmanship to his son Howard Buffett. Greg Abel already runs Berkshire as CEO, while Buffett remains a director and chairman emeritus.
The succession makes Berkshire’s equity portfolio more interesting than usual. Two of its largest technology holdings are Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL), giving the company exposure to two very different versions of the AI trade.
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Berkshire owns distribution rather than the hottest AI hardware
Apple remains one of Berkshire’s largest publicly traded positions. Its AI case is not based on selling GPUs. Apple owns a giant installed base of premium devices, which gives it an unusually direct route for distributing AI services if those products become useful enough to change consumer behavior.
That advantage comes with an obvious problem. Apple Inc. has spent much of the generative-AI boom looking slower than Google, OpenAI and Meta. The bull case is that Apple can monetize AI once the technology becomes reliable enough for mass-market deployment. The bear case is that controlling distribution matters less if consumers increasingly choose software ecosystems independently of their devices.
Alphabet Inc. offers almost the inverse exposure. Berkshire dramatically expanded its Alphabet position in Q2, with the holding reaching nearly 106 million shares worth roughly $37.8 billion at quarter end. Google already operates frontier models, AI infrastructure, cloud services and consumer products at global scale. AI can strengthen Search, Cloud and YouTube, but it can also change the economics of the search advertising franchise that funds much of Alphabet’s spending.
The holdings predate Buffett’s chairmanship transition
Across Insider Monkey’s tracked funds, Apple ownership slipped to 169 hedge funds in Q2 from 170 in Q1. Arrowstreet Capital held about 29.9 million shares after increasing its position 54%. Alphabet moved in the opposite direction: 275 funds held GOOGL, up from 265, while Arrowstreet held nearly 15 million shares after trimming its position 13%.
Apple had roughly 139.7 million shares sold short at the August 31 settlement date, about 1% of public float, with roughly 3.5 days to cover.
None of this means Buffett personally chose the two stocks as an AI portfolio. Berkshire’s investment organization is broader than Buffett, and Abel now controls capital allocation. What the portfolio does show is more interesting: Berkshire enters a new leadership era owning two of the strongest distribution systems through which consumer AI could eventually be monetized.
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