This article was originally published on Fool.com. All figures quoted in US dollars unless otherwise stated.
The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution continues to pick up steam and is on pace to be this century's most transformative technology trend thus far. It's also on pace to be one of the best wealth-generating opportunities for long-term investors.
And when it comes to long-term investing, who has a better track record than Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett? The Oracle of Omaha has helped Berkshire grow to a market capitalisation of more than $1 trillion, and the investment conglomerate owns a portfolio of publicly traded stocks totalling $299 billion.
Roughly 24% of that $299 billion stock portfolio is concentrated in just two companies that are betting heavily on the future of AI. If you're looking to get a read on what moves Buffett is making in the artificial intelligence space, read on for two Motley Fool contributors' look at a pair of tech titans that Berkshire has its money behind.
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This tech giant is still Berkshire's biggest bet
Keith Noonan (Apple): Accounting for roughly 23% of Berkshire Hathaway's stock portfolio based on the company's most recent public disclosure, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is still the largest overall stock holding for Buffett's company — and by a substantial margin. By extension, it's also by far the company's biggest bet in the AI space. But Berkshire has actually been significantly reducing its stake in the company over the past year.
At one point, Apple accounted for over half of the company's stock portfolio, but Berkshire sold more than 600 million shares in 2024. AI could actually be playing a role in Buffett's move to diversify away from his company's biggest stock holding.
The iPhone continues to be Apple's most important performance driver, and the company has made its Apple Intelligence software a central selling point for its industry-leading hardware. Unfortunately, this has actually created some challenges for the tech giant.
China continues to be the company's second-largest market, trailing behind only the U.S., but the software actually isn't available for customers in that country. Because Chinese regulations require foreign products to be sold through a domestic partner, Apple Intelligence isn't featured on the iPhone 16 line in the country.
Meanwhile, Chinese-made phones are offering their own AI platforms and interfaces — and Apple is facing a much more challenging growth environment in the country as a result.
Revenue rose 4% year over year to $124.3 billion in the first quarter of its current fiscal year (ended Dec. 31). Meanwhile, sales in China fell 11% year over year to roughly $18.5 billion. But Apple has now signed a deal with Alibaba to bring the Apple Intelligence platform to iPhones, so it's possible performance will improve significantly.
Buffett and Berkshire likely continue to think that Apple is a great company, but he remains a value investor at heart. So despite long-term opportunities in AI, moves to sell Apple stock mean that Buffett's company has actually been reducing its exposure to the trend.
A small Berkshire position, but a powerful AI play
Jennifer Saibil (Amazon): Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is one of the premier names in AI today, and it's developing a large suite of services to establish itself as a leader and benefit from the rise of the technology. As the largest e-commerce company in the U.S. and the largest global cloud services company, it can leverage its top position to grab market share in this trend.
Its most notable efforts are in its cloud services division under the umbrella of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It has a large assortment of products and services that it continues to roll out and that are changing the game for its clients.
Amazon Q is its AI-powered assistant that can take care of many tasks and find solutions for many problems. It has the highest reported rate of acceptance for multi-line coding assistance, and its agentic AI can speed up coding tasks by 80%. Amazon says it has saved clients 450,000 working hours.
It offers three levels of generative AI services for cloud clients. The base level has tools for developers to build completely customized large-language models (LLM), where they train their data. Amazon Bedrock, the middle layer, gives developers access to Amazon's own LLMs. On the top layer, ready-to-use tools help smaller businesses to generate images, content, and more.
Management recently made a $4 billion investment in Anthropic, and it has a strategic collaboration with it that uses Amazon chips to create its foundation models, the building blocks of generative AI. Anthropic develops AI models, and it's the technology behind the best-in-class Claude generative AI model.
Amazon is seeing incredible results from its AI business, which is already creating billions of dollars in revenue. Management thinks this is just the tip of the iceberg, and there's going to be a huge shift toward cloud services and the generative AI solutions they offer.
The tech giant is also using AI throughout its other segments, offering generative AI services to third-party sellers on the e-commerce platform and using the breadth of its data for its competitive advertising business.
Amazon is one of Berkshire Hathaway's smaller positions, accounting for less than 1% of the total, but it adds growth power to the total portfolio.
This article was originally published on Fool.com. All figures quoted in US dollars unless otherwise stated.
