Greg Abel's Alphabet Bet Topped Berkshire's Coca-Cola Stake

Something changed at Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRKA) (NYSE: BRKB) this year, and the clearest sign of it is not a line in a filing. It is the arrival of a new company in a position near the top of its stock portfolio. For decades, Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) held a place of honor as Warren Buffett's signature forever holding. It supplied the drinks he sipped on stage at annual meetings and was the business he used to teach investors about brands and moats.

In 2026, a technology company built on search and artificial intelligence passed it in the Berkshire portfolio.

How Abel's Alphabet position topped the Coca-Cola stake

Greg Abel took over as Berkshire's chief executive on Jan. 1, and he moved with purpose. Across the first quarter, Berkshire more than tripled the size of its Class A holding in Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and opened a new Class C position. On June 1, Alphabet announced an $80 billion equity raise to fund its AI infrastructure, and Berkshire stepped in as an anchor investor with a $10 billion private placement, split between Class A and Class C shares. That deal, disclosed in Alphabet's own SEC filing, pushed the combined stake past $40 billion -- a mark that clears the Coca-Cola position Buffett spent a career defending.

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The private placement deal is the part I keep returning to. Berkshire did more than buy Alphabet stock on the open market. It supplied growth capital directly to one of the largest companies on Earth at a discount to the market price to help fund the build-out of data centers and compute infrastructure. Buffett wrote very few checks like that for public companies. Abel did it in his first six months.

The business behind Berkshire's Alphabet bet

The results give Abel cover. In Q1, Alphabet reported revenue of $109.9 billion, and Google Cloud revenue crossed $20 billion in a single quarter for the first time. Its cloud backlog -- future contracted revenue the company has yet to record -- climbed above $460 billion.

For newer investors, that backlog matters because it represents demand for AI infrastructure that customers have signed and paid for in advance. That's not a forecast. The search segment carries the business, and it commands most of the world's query traffic. That is the durable advantage Buffett and Charlie Munger admired, even as they confessed, for years, that they had missed out on investing in Google.

The bull case for this move has holes worth naming. Concentration cuts both ways. A bigger Alphabet position means a bigger dependence on one stock and one AI thesis. Alphabet plans to spend $180 billion or more on capital expenditures this year, and that spending will reward shareholders if AI demand holds. Regulators continue to circle the search and advertising business. A discounted private placement helps Berkshire, yet it dilutes existing Alphabet holders.

For investors, the takeaway is less about Alphabet's chart and more about what Abel is telling you. He will concentrate, act quickly, and buy into technology companies that Buffett largely avoided. Watch for Berkshire's next move. With its cash stockpile near $400 billion, this may just have been the opening one.

Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet and Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.