Buffett's Departure Brings New Era for Berkshire's Tech Holdings

Warren Buffett stepped down as Berkshire Hathaway's chairman on September 18, marking the end of more than five decades in the job. His son Howard Buffett took over as non-executive chairman.

Buffett remains a director and chairman emeritus, while Greg Abel continues to run Berkshire as CEO. The succession has made Berkshire's equity portfolio more interesting, with two of its largest technology holdings being Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL).

Apple remains one of Berkshire's largest publicly traded positions, but its AI case is not based on selling GPUs. Instead, it benefits from a large installed base of premium devices, giving it an unusually direct route for distributing AI services if those products become useful enough to change consumer behavior.

Berkshire owns nearly 106 million Alphabet shares worth around $37.8 billion at the end of Q2, with Google already operating frontier models, AI infrastructure, cloud services, and consumer products at a global scale.