Berkshire Hathaway famously missed past tech waves, to Warren Buffett’s regret. New CEO Greg Abel is determined not to miss this one.
Berkshire’s $10 billion investment in Alphabet will anchor an $80 billion share sale to pay for Google’s AI spending. It’s an unusual move for Berkshire, which has historically reserved its big checks for corporate takeovers or lucrative rescues of troubled firms, the role it played in 2008. Buffett famously passed on investing early in Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, and his longtime friend, Bill Gates, had to personally tell him to stop using the Altavista search engine. “That’s cost people a lot of money at Berkshire,” he has said.
The deal — Alphabet’s first straight equity raise since 2005 — is also notable for what it says about the costs of the AI buildout, and how companies pay for it.
Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon’s capex spending doubled to $450 billion in 2025 and is expected to exceed $700 billion this year. Cash from their ads, cloud, and e-commerce businesses easily covered early spending, but then companies started borrowing to pay for AI. Issuing new shares is an even more expensive option.
