Buffett Finally Buys Google. So Why Now?
Somewhere in Omaha, an old regret just got a little smaller. Berkshire Hathaway has disclosed a roughly $4.3 billion stake in Alphabet, owner of Google, snapping up about 17.8 million voting shares and instantly making it one of the conglomerate’s top ten holdings. Alphabet gets the Buffett seal of approval. The market gets a fresh narrative about value investors and AI. And everyone else gets to ask the fun question: what took him so long?
A rare late-career tech swing
For most of his six decades at Berkshire, Warren Buffett treated Silicon Valley like a very nice place to visit but not somewhere you put serious capital. Tech was volatile, fashion driven and firmly outside his famous circle of competence. Apple was the huge exception. Now Alphabet joins that very short list.
The timing is striking. Berkshire is trimming Apple again, down to about 238 million shares from a peak above 900 million, even though it remains the biggest single holding at roughly $60 billion. At the same time, it is still a net seller of equities overall, with cash piling up to a record near $380 billion. In that context, writing a multibillion-dollar cheque for Alphabet is not a casual trade. It is a deliberate portfolio pivot.
It may also be one of the last big moves that can reasonably be called a Buffett trade. He steps down as chief executive at the end of 2025, with Greg Abel due to take over. Even if one of his lieutenants pressed the buy button, nobody doubts that a new $4 billion position passed under the boss’s nose.
Alphabet finally looks like a Buffett stock
The interesting part is not that Berkshire bought a hot AI name. It is that Alphabet now looks uncomfortably close to a classic Buffett business, just with more hoodies.
Alphabet dominates global search. Advertising still throws off colossal and remarkably predictable cash flows. YouTube has matured into a second advertising engine. Google Cloud is finally earning proper grown-up margins. Analysts now talk about Alphabet as an infrastructure landlord for the AI age, selling compute, tools and distribution rather than simply chasing the next viral app.
Crucially for a value investor, it is doing all of this at valuations that look positively restrained beside some of its AI-soaked peers. Reuters notes that Alphabet trades at a discount to other big AI beneficiaries such as Nvidia and Microsoft, despite being the best-performing Big Tech stock of 2025, up around 45 per cent. For a man who has spent three years complaining about inflated prices, this looks like the rare growth machine that still clears his hurdle rate.
Haunted by Google and Amazon
There is also a psychological subplot. Buffett and the late Charlie Munger have been extraordinarily public about their tech regrets. On Google in particular, they did not just miss the boat; they watched it load passengers. GEICO, a Berkshire insurer, was paying Google handsomely for search ads long before the IPO. Both men later admitted they had all the clues they needed. Munger’s verdict was blunt: “We screwed up.” Buffett’s summary was “We blew it.”
Amazon comes with a similar confession. Buffett called himself “an idiot” for not buying the stock earlier, even as he praised Jeff Bezos as “something close to a miracle”. He blamed his own caution about businesses that looked too miraculous and his discomfort with technology that sat outside his circle of competence.
Those regrets matter because they shaped how Berkshire thought about digital moats. Google and Amazon were not just clever gadgets. They were toll roads on the internet itself. Alphabet in 2025 is, in many ways, the fully grown version of the thing Buffett feels he should have bought twenty years ago.
Why now, not then?
If you squint, the timing looks almost perverse. Alphabet has already run hard this year, helped by a 45 per cent rally on renewed confidence in its AI strategy and resilience of its core search franchise.
Yet that is exactly the sort of pattern Buffett has followed before. With Apple, he waited until the iPhone was a global habit and the company behaved more like a consumer staples giant than a hyper-growth story. With Alphabet, he is again turning up after adolescence is over, once the business model has been storm-tested by an AI panic and a few antitrust headaches. Core search held up. YouTube kept printing money. Cloud turned profitable. Alphabet still has a towering data, distribution and infrastructure moat.
There is also an unmistakable portfolio logic. Berkshire has been cooling on Apple just as investors worry that it is lagging rivals in AI. Alphabet, by contrast, is pouring billions into data centres and custom silicon, and is seen by several analysts as a front-rank AI player rather than a follower. Swapping a slice of Apple exposure for Alphabet does not abandon the tech theme. It rotates the bet towards the companies that own the pipes and platforms of the AI era.
Finally, the sheer size of Berkshire’s cash pile matters. When you are sitting on more than US$380 billion and complaining about the lack of bargains, a capital-light giant with recurring cash flows and a credible AI strategy starts to look less like a growth stock and more like the best utility you can buy.
What this tells the rest of us
Berkshire’s move does not make Alphabet risk-free. AI capex could disappoint, regulators can still bite and competition is not going away. But when a man who once used AltaVista out of habit finally agrees that Google is worth owning at a three trillion dollar valuation, that sends a clear signal.
This is not Buffett chasing the latest AI bubble. It looks more like the consummate value investor admitting that the infrastructure of the digital world has become as essential, and as bankable, as railroads and cola once were. He missed Google and Amazon the first time. Alphabet is his way of making sure that, in the AI chapter of market history, Berkshire is written into the story rather than just quoted in the footnotes about regret.
