---
title: "Berkshire Hathaway Buys $10 Billion of Alphabet Directly, Deepening Its New Bet on Google"
description: "Berkshire Hathaway agreed to buy $10 billion of Alphabet shares straight from the company in a private placement, anchoring an roughly $85 billion capital raise to fund Google's AI build-out and more than doubling a stake first revealed only months earlier."
category: "Markets"
category_url: https://boursel.com/category/markets
author: "Sofia Marchetti"
published: 2026-06-24T11:28:00.000Z
updated: 2026-06-24T11:28:00.000Z
canonical: https://boursel.com/article/berkshire-10-billion-alphabet-placement
tags: ["berkshire-hathaway", "alphabet", "google", "warren-buffett", "ai-infrastructure"]
---
# Berkshire Hathaway Buys $10 Billion of Alphabet Directly, Deepening Its New Bet on Google

Berkshire Hathaway agreed to buy $10 billion of Alphabet shares straight from the company in a private placement, anchoring an roughly $85 billion capital raise to fund Google's AI build-out and more than doubling a stake first revealed only months earlier.

Berkshire Hathaway has committed $10 billion to Alphabet's stock, buying the shares directly from the company rather than on the open market. The investment, announced June 1, anchors one of the largest equity raises ever by a public technology company and marks a notable deepening of Berkshire's recent and uncharacteristic embrace of Google's parent.

Per [Alphabet's announcement reported by CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/berkshire-hathaway-alphabet-investment.html), Berkshire's $10 billion was split into $5 billion of Class A voting shares at $351.81 each and $5 billion of Class C nonvoting shares at $348.20 each — a discount of more than 6% to Alphabet's June 1 closing price, according to Alphabet's own [SEC filing](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001652044/000119312526257724/d83560dex991.htm).

## What 'private placement' actually means

A private placement is a sale of new shares to a single buyer or a small group, negotiated directly with the issuer instead of through the public market. The company gets fresh cash; the investor typically gets a fixed price, often at a modest discount, in exchange for committing a large sum at once. So the "private placement price" is a real, specific price Berkshire paid to Alphabet — lower than what an ordinary investor would have paid on the exchange that day. The trade-off is that the new shares dilute existing holders.

The purchase was part of a much larger fundraising. Alphabet set out to raise roughly $80 billion — a figure that grew to about $84.75 billion as demand pushed the deal larger, [TechTimes reported](https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317699/20260603/alphabet-prices-8475-billion-equity-raise-berkshire-hathaway-doubles-down-ai-infrastructure.htm). The company said it is experiencing demand for its AI services "at levels that are exceeding the company's available supply," and that proceeds would fund capital spending to expand AI infrastructure and global compute capacity, [HPCwire reported](https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/alphabet-announces-80b-capital-raise-including-10b-berkshire-hathaway-investment/). Berkshire's private placement was the cornerstone, alongside underwritten public offerings of common and convertible preferred stock and an at-the-market program.

## Why this matters

Berkshire spent decades avoiding big technology bets, and Warren Buffett has called missing Google one of his costliest investing mistakes. That makes the timing striking. Berkshire's first-ever Alphabet position surfaced only in its third-quarter 2025 [13F filing](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/15/berkshire-hathaways-surprising-new-tech-stake.html) — a quarterly disclosure the SEC requires from large institutional managers, listing their U.S. stock holdings at quarter-end. That filing, Buffett's last as CEO, showed about 17.85 million shares worth roughly $4.3 billion, immediately making Alphabet a top-10 Berkshire holding. The $10 billion direct purchase, agreed under incoming chief executive Greg Abel, more than doubles down on that view.

The signal cuts two ways. For Alphabet, securing Berkshire as an anchor buyer lends a value investor's seal of approval to a multibillion-dollar AI spending campaign that some shareholders worry is dilutive — part of the broader AI capital-spending surge Boursel has tracked. For Berkshire, it is a rare large-scale technology commitment from a firm long defined by caution, and a sign that Abel may be more willing than Buffett was to pay up for a dominant tech franchise. Markets were lukewarm: Alphabet shares slipped on the news, reflecting unease about issuing so much new stock.