Buffett's AI Exposure: Apple and Amazon Make Up Nearly a Quarter of Berkshire's $299B Portfolio

Berkshire Hathaway holds a portfolio of publicly traded stocks worth $299 billion, and roughly 24% of it sits in two companies that are spending heavily on artificial intelligence: Apple and Amazon. That is the starting point of a Motley Fool analysis, written by two contributors, that looks at what Warren Buffett's conglomerate actually has riding on the technology.

The split between the two is lopsided. Apple makes up about 23% of the portfolio, based on Berkshire's most recent public disclosure, and it remains the largest holding by a wide margin. That also makes it, by extension, Berkshire's biggest bet on AI. Amazon accounts for less than 1% of the total. Berkshire itself has grown to a market capitalisation above $1 trillion under Buffett.

The Apple position has been shrinking. At one point the iPhone maker accounted for more than half of Berkshire's stock portfolio, but Berkshire sold more than 600 million shares during 2024. Writer Keith Noonan suggests AI may be playing a part in the decision to diversify away from the company, though that is his reading rather than anything Berkshire has stated. He also notes that Buffett remains a value investor at heart, and that selling Apple stock means Berkshire has been reducing its exposure to the AI trend, not increasing it.

Apple's own AI story has a complication. The iPhone is still its most important performance driver, and the company has made its Apple Intelligence software a central selling point of the hardware. But China, Apple's second-largest market behind only the United States, does not get the feature. Chinese regulations require foreign products to be sold through a domestic partner, so Apple Intelligence is not part of the iPhone 16 line there. Meanwhile, Chinese-made phones are offering their own AI platforms and interfaces.

The numbers show the strain. Apple's revenue rose 4% year over year to $124.3 billion in the first quarter of its current fiscal year, which ended Dec. 31. Sales in China fell 11% to roughly $18.5 billion. Apple has since signed a deal with Alibaba to bring Apple Intelligence to iPhones in the country, and Noonan says that could improve performance significantly, though he frames it as a possibility.

Amazon is the smaller position but, in the analysis by Jennifer Saibil, a powerful AI play. She points to its status as the largest e-commerce company in the U.S. and the largest global cloud services company, positions it can use to take market share. Its main AI efforts sit in Amazon Web Services. Amazon Q, its AI-powered assistant, 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.

AWS offers generative AI in three layers. The base layer gives developers tools to build fully customised large language models trained on their own data. Amazon Bedrock, the middle layer, gives access to Amazon's own models. The top layer offers ready-made tools that let smaller businesses generate images, content and more.

Amazon also made a $4 billion investment in Anthropic, the developer behind the Claude generative AI model, and the two have a strategic collaboration in which Anthropic uses Amazon chips to build its foundation models. Management says its AI business is already producing billions of dollars in revenue and believes this is the tip of the iceberg. The company is also applying AI to third-party sellers on its marketplace and to its advertising business.

What to watch: whether the Alibaba arrangement brings Apple Intelligence to iPhones in China and turns around falling sales there, and whether Berkshire's next disclosure shows further selling of Apple.