On May 3, Warren Buffett announced he will step down from his role as the CEO of the Berkshire Hathaway holding company at the end of 2025. He has been in the job since 1965, and his incredible stock-picking ability contributed to a stupendous compound annual return of 19.9% for investors.
In other words, an investment of $1,000 in Berkshire stock in 1965 would have been worth a whopping $44.7 million at the end of 2024. The same investment in the S&P 500 index would have grown to just $342,906 over the same period.
Although Buffett is stepping down as CEO, he will remain Berkshire's chairman so he will still have some influence over the conglomerate's strategy. That means Buffett's brand of long-term investing, which focuses on companies with steady growth, reliable profitability, and strong management teams, is likely to endure.
One thing Buffett never did was pile into the latest stock market trends -- not even those as powerful as artificial intelligence (AI). With that said, three existing holdings, which make up 32.9% of Berkshire's $286 billion portfolio of publicly traded stocks and securities, are using AI to supercharge their legacy businesses.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
1. Amazon: 0.7% of Berkshire Hathaway's portfolio
Amazon(NASDAQ: AMZN) operates the world's biggest e-commerce platform, and it uses AI in several ways. The technology is woven into the recommendation engine on Amazon.com to show shoppers the products they are most likely to buy, and it also powers the Rufus virtual assistant, which helps customers make the most informed decisions.
But the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform is the real engine behind the company's AI strategy. AWS designed its own data center chips for AI development, which are up to 40% cheaper to use than third-party hardware from suppliers like Nvidia. It also created its own family of large language models (LLMs) called Nova, which the company claims can save developers up to 75% on costs compared to using other third-party models on the AWS Bedrock platform.
Then there is the Amazon Q AI assistant, which is embedded into AWS. It can help businesses analyze their internal data, and it can even accelerate human-led coding tasks by 80%. This means software projects are completed far more quickly, and at a lower cost.
Amazon generated $155.7 billion in total revenue during the first quarter of 2025. AWS contributed just $29.3 billion to that total, but Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said AI revenue within AWS is now at a multibillion-dollar annual run rate, and it's growing at a triple-digit percentage year over year. In other words, AI could soon become the key growth driver behind AWS, and Amazon overall.
Berkshire bought Amazon stock in 2019, and it makes up just 0.7% of the conglomerate's portfolio. Buffett has expressed regret for failing to identify the opportunity sooner, but at least he and Berkshire are in a position to benefit from Amazon's next potential growth phase, driven by AI.
2. Coca-Cola: 10% of Berkshire Hathaway's portfolio
Coca-Cola(NYSE: KO) is the world's largest beverage company, and it owes at least some of its success to its aggressive investments in technology. It became clear the company wasn't going to miss the AI revolution when it appointed Pratik Thakar as head of generative AI back in 2023 to oversee its strategy.
Since then, the beverage giant has used AI to create content for interactive marketing campaigns, and even to create a new promotional beverage called Coca-Cola Y3000. The drink was formulated by inputting mountains of customer data into an AI model, to predict what Coca-Cola might taste like in the year 3000. But in a recent interview, Thakar said "everything will be generative AI" eventually, so this is just the tip of the iceberg.
In fact, in 2024, Coca-Cola signed a deal to spend $1.1 billion over five years with Microsoft Azure to integrate AI into its manufacturing processes, its supply chains, and deeper into its marketing strategies.
AI certainly wasn't part of Buffett's investing thesis when he acquired 400 million Coca-Cola shares on Berkshire's behalf between 1988 and 1994. He has never sold a single one, and the initial investment of $1.3 billion is now worth a whopping $28.6 billion. Plus, Berkshire earned $776 million in dividends from its Coca-Cola stake last year alone.
The Coca-Cola position is a perfect example of Buffett's long-term investing strategy, where he lets time and the magic of compounding do the heavy lifting.
3. Apple: 22.2% of Berkshire Hathaway's portfolio
Buffett and his team spent approximately $38 billion accumulating Apple(NASDAQ: AAPL) shares between 2016 and 2023. Going into 2024, that position was worth over $170 billion, accounting for around half of Berkshire's entire portfolio at the time. That level of concentration creates unnecessary risks so Buffett sold more than half of the position throughout last year, but Apple remains the conglomerate's single largest holding, representing 22.2% of its portfolio today.
Apple has been preparing for the AI revolution for years. The company designs its own chips, and the latest versions for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers were crafted with AI workloads in mind. They laid the groundwork for the launch of Apple Intelligence last year, which is a suite of AI-powered applications and features that are now embedded into its operating systems.
Apple Intelligence provides users with powerful new writing tools, allowing them to summarize lengthy emails and text messages with a single click. It can also generate replies on command, or proofread what the user has written. Apple Intelligence can also prioritize notifications based on what is important to each individual user, and thanks to an integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT, the Siri voice assistant is now smarter than ever before.
There are more than 2.35 billion active Apple devices worldwide, so the company could become the biggest distributor of AI to consumers. That will create substantial opportunities -- Apple is likely to find unique ways to monetize AI software, and as this technology grows more powerful, consumers might be enticed to upgrade their devices so they have the necessary hardware to unlock its full potential.
Therefore, Berkshire could still earn significant returns from its remaining Apple stake as the company's AI strategy unfolds.
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John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Anthony Di Pizio has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
