Some of the best investing returns happen quietly, after the headlines have moved on. The patient buyers, not the loud ones, tend to win in the end.
That has been the Warren Buffett playbook for six decades. Avoid the buzz, find the boring cash machines, and let compounding do the talking. The Oracle of Omaha used to joke that the longer he held a great business, the lazier he got. It worked.
So when Berkshire Hathaway slipped a surprise tech name into its portfolio last November, just weeks before Buffett’s planned retirement as Berkshire CEO, plenty of investors raised an eyebrow. Berkshire was supposed to be done loading up on Silicon Valley after the Apple (AAPL) spree. Apparently not.
Six months later, the bet is already up roughly 40%, and an earnings report last week has sent the stock to fresh all-time highs. The Oracle, even on his way out, may have called another one.
The name on the ticker is Alphabet (GOOGL), Google’s parent company, and on my analysis the timing was almost too good to be true.
Photo by Erman Gunes on Getty Images
How Berkshire’s Alphabet position caught Wall Street off guard
For most of his career, Buffett avoided the giant internet names, with Alphabet at the top of the list. He and the late Charlie Munger spent years calling Google one of their biggest missed opportunities, even though Berkshire’s GEICO subsidiary had been paying Google up to $11 per ad click for years.
That changed on Nov. 14, 2025. A quarterly Form 13F filing revealed a new Berkshire position of 17.85 million Class C Alphabet shares, valued at roughly $4.3 billion as of Sept. 30, “according to” CNBC.
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The stake instantly became Berkshire’s tenth-largest equity holding, claiming “almost 1.4% of its total stock portfolio,” reported Yahoo Finance. At the same time, the firm trimmed its long-running Apple position, signaling a real reweighting of Berkshire’s tech exposure.
The size of the trade said something too. Berkshire still sat on a record cash pile near $381.7 billion at the end of the quarter while remaining a net seller of stocks for the twelfth consecutive quarter.
Adding a fresh $4.3 billion to a name Buffett had publicly called one of his biggest misses suggested the firm’s investment team finally got the price they wanted.
The market got the message. Alphabet shares were “up more than 46% in the year to date, and more than 12% in just the past month, making it the top-performing Magnificent 7 stock,” reported Barchart on the day of the disclosure.
Alphabet’s blowout earnings turned Buffett’s bet into the trade of 2026
Then came earnings. On April 29, Alphabet posted a first-quarter 2026 print that cleared an already-elevated bar by a wide margin. Shares jumped 9.96% the next day, capping a month in which the stock posted “its best monthly performance since 2004,” reported The Motley Fool.
Revenue hit $109.9 billion, up 22% year over year, “the company’s highest rate of growth for any quarter since 2022,” “according to” CNBC. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $2.62, with reported net income of $62.6 billion, up 81% year over year.
Google Cloud was the headliner. Cloud revenue grew 63%, “exceeding $20 billion for the first time,” CEO Sundar Pichai told investors on the earnings call, “according to” Alphabet’s investor blog. The segment’s order backlog “nearly doubled quarter-on-quarter to over $460 billion.”
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Search held its own too. Search and other advertising revenue grew 19% in the quarter, with Pichai noting that “search queries are at an all-time high” thanks to features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. The takeaway for advertisers, in my reading, is that AI has not cannibalized Google’s core money-printer the way bears feared. It has expanded it.
A short look at the Q1 2026 numbers that mattered most:
- Revenue of $109.9 billion, up 22% year over year, the highest quarterly growth rate since 2022.Â
- Google Cloud revenue of $20.03 billion, up 63% year over year, the third straight quarter of accelerating growth.
- Adjusted EPS of $2.62 vs. the $2.63 LSEG consensus, with net income up 81% year over year.
- 2026 capital-spending guidance raised to a range of $180 billion to $190 billion, up from $175 billion to $185 billion.
Source: CNBC
Wall Street responded fast. Needham analyst Laura Martin raised her price target on Alphabet to “$450 from $400,” keeping a Buy rating and writing that Google “is Stalking AMZN’s Core Business,” reported Benzinga. JP Morgan’s Doug Anmuth went higher, lifting his target to “$460 from $395” and naming Alphabet his firm’s “top overall pick.”
What Buffett’s Alphabet bet means for retail investors
This is where the story turns practical. The Alphabet position Berkshire reported in November carried a quarter-end value of roughly $4.3 billion.
By the time the filing hit the SEC, paper gains had pushed it toward $4.9 billion, according to CNBC. At the current price near $385 a share, those 17.85 million shares are worth almost $6.9 billion.
When I ran the numbers against the implied disclosure-date cost basis, the gap is striking. That is a paper gain of roughly $2 billion in less than six months on what was Berkshire’s single largest stock addition of the third quarter. The gain alone is bigger than the entire market cap of plenty of S&P 500 mid-caps.
The CEO’s own words explain the optimism. “Our enterprise AI solutions have become our primary growth driver for cloud for the first time in Q1,” Pichai told analysts on the earnings call, CNBC highlighted. He also said the company is “compute-constrained in the near term,” meaning Cloud revenue would have been higher if Alphabet could spin up servers fast enough.
That last line is the one I keep coming back to. A trillion-dollar hyperscaler telling Wall Street that demand for AI is outpacing the actual supply of chips and data center capacity is, in plain English, a pricing-power story. It is also the kind of “boring cash machine” Buffett built his career chasing, just dressed in newer clothes.
Greg Abel, who took the Berkshire CEO chair on Jan. 1, will decide whether to add to the position or trim it when the firm’s first quarterly 13F under his watch hits later this spring. With Alphabet’s market cap pushing toward $5 trillion and the company’s own capital spending now projected at $180 billion to $190 billion for 2026, “according to” CNBC, the question for retail investors is whether the run still has room. If Q1 was the proof point that AI is paying for itself, the next four earnings cycles will tell us how much room is left in Buffett’s parting bet.
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