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The new guy at Berkshire is doing something Buffett never would
For sixty years Warren Buffett ran Berkshire Hathaway like a man who broke out into a rash when anything tech dropped. Fast forward to his retirement on the last day of 2025 and he handed the keys to Greg Abel. What did Abel do? He gutted the portfolio, piled into Alphabet, and just dropped $10 billion into Google’s giant new stock sale. That’s not a tweak. That’s a wholesale we are all in on AI vote.
The biggest stock sale in history happened. Did you just scroll past it?
Here’s the part that should’ve been everywhere. Alphabet priced an $84.75 billion equity offering on June 2, and it isn’t just the largest stock sale in tech history. It’s the largest equity offering of any kind, in any industry, EVER. The old record was a $70 billion sale by a Brazilian oil company back in 2010. Demand was so hungry that Alphabet had planned $80 billion and got bumped up because investors wanted in. A company sitting on a mountain of cash is selling stock anyway. I guess the AI bill is worse than they thought?
They’re spending the GDP of a small country on robots that hum
Want a number that doesn’t fit in your head? Alphabet now plans to spend up to $190 billion on capital expenses in 2026, mostly data centers and AI chips, and they’ve already said 2027 will be “significantly higher.” That’s one company. Across all the big tech players, AI spending tops $700 billion this year, up from about $600 billion they expected earlier. The reason is pretty basic. Gemini hit nearly 900 million monthly users by May, and all those people chatting are consuming compute like it’s an open bar.
Three trillion-dollar IPOs are stacking up like planes on a runway
Berkshire’s check didn’t land in a vacuum. The day before Alphabet priced its sale, Anthropic quietly filed confidential IPO paperwork, eyeing a valuation north of a trillion dollars. OpenAI and SpaceX are reportedly lining up too. So we’ve got the biggest stock offering ever and a parade of the largest tech listings ever, all crammed into a few weeks. Either this is the most important moment for markets since the dot-com days, or it’s the most expensive lesson nobody wants to admit they’re paying for.
So is this a genius move or the top of a bubble?
That’s the trillion-dollar question, and nobody actually knows. The optimists say AI demand is real and these companies are racing to build before they fall behind. The skeptics say “bubble” out loud, point at thin profit margins, and wait for the music to stop. Abel betting $10 billion of Berkshire’s money doesn’t settle it either way. The firm that once treated tech like a rash is now all in, which either means the smart money finally sees it, or the smart money got swept up just like everyone else. Which side are you picking?
Sources: Bloomberg, Reuters, CNBC, CNN, NPR, Associated Press, The Motley Fool