Warren Buffett "Secretly" Owns 3 Industry-Leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks

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When it comes to widely followed Wall Street money managers, Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE: BRK.A)(NYSE: BRK.B) CEO Warren Buffett is in a class of his own. In the roughly six decades since taking the reins, the aptly named "Oracle of Omaha" has overseen an aggregate return in his company's Class A shares (BRK.A) of around 5,422,200%, which blows the cumulative total return (including dividends) of 38,751% for the benchmark S&P 500 over the same timeline out of the water.

Considering how much Buffett has outperformed the broader market, it's not uncommon for investors to mirror his trades. This can be done by tracking Berkshire's quarterly filed Form 13F, which provides a snapshot of which stocks Buffett and his team have been buying and selling.

However, Berkshire's 13F only tells part of the story of what's under the hood.

A jovial Warren Buffett surrounded by people at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting.
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. Image source: The Motley Fool.

Berkshire has a secret $642 million portfolio -- and it holds a trio of high-growth AI stocks

In 1998, Berkshire Hathaway announced it would acquire reinsurance company General Re in an all-stock deal worth $22 billion. Though the reinsurance operations were the catalyst for this deal, General Re also owned a specialty investment firm known as New England Asset Management (NEAM). When the deal finalized in late 1998, Berkshire Hathaway became NEAM's new owner.

As of the closing bell on Sept. 30, NEAM had $642 million in assets under management that was invested across 120 securities (stocks, warrants, and exchanged-traded funds). Even though the Oracle of Omaha doesn't manage NEAM's investments the way he does for Berkshire Hathaway's 44-stock, $293 billion portfolio, what NEAM owns is, by definition, also owned by Buffett's company.

Though this "secret" portfolio for Warren Buffett has traditionally been focused on value stocks and brand-name businesses, it also holds shares of three of the hottest artificial intelligence (AI) stocks on the planet.

Broadcom

The first high-flying AI stock Warren Buffett secretly owns is industry-leading networking-solutions provider Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO). New England Asset Management closed out the third quarter with 19,855 shares of Broadcom, which has a present-day value of nearly $4.5 million.

Just as Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) have been the undisputed top choice by businesses wanting to run generative AI solutions and build/train large language models (LLMs), Broadcom's AI networking solutions have been the preferred choice for AI-accelerated data centers. For instance, the company's Jericho3-AI fabric is capable of connecting up to 32,000 GPUs to maximize computing speed and reduce tail latency. Minimizing response lag is especially important for AI-driven software and systems.