In my last model portfolio update, I left you with a question I said I'd come back to:

Now that I've put money into Microsoft, why haven't I done the same with Google?

Back in Q3 2025, Berkshire's 13F showed something new: a stake in Alphabet.

Not a huge one, but notable — Berkshire had gone essentially its entire history without owning a piece of Google.

By Q1 2026, that stake had tripled. Then in June, Alphabet went to the market to raise $80 billion for AI infrastructure, and Berkshire wrote a $10 billion check directly into the deal. Today, Berkshire owns roughly $41 billion of Alphabet — about 9% of its entire portfolio, and its fourth-largest holding, ahead of Coca-Cola.

That's a fast build for a company Berkshire ignored for sixty years.

I don't copy trades.

Berkshire buying something isn't a reason for me to buy it — at best it's a reason to go find out why they bought it. And the "why" mattered here, because on the surface, this isn't a value entry. Alphabet isn't beaten down. It's trading near highs.

To be clear: of course Google is a good business. That part isn't in question.

Google is arguably the only company that simultaneously owns the search index, a leading AI model (Gemini), the distribution (Android, Chrome, YouTube), and the cloud infrastructure underneath all of it. Every other AI player has to pay rent on at least one of those layers — buy distribution, rent compute, license a model. Google owns the whole stack.

That's a real moat, and it's the reason nobody's arguing Google is a bad business to own.

But "good business" and "good price" are two different questions, and the second one is the one that actually decides whether you buy.

Alphabet's 2026 capex is guided to $195–205 billion, with management saying 2027 goes higher still.

That's the real story behind the capital raise: even a company generating Alphabet's cash flow needed outside money to fund the AI buildout at the pace it wanted.

That's an arms race, not a comfortable expansion plan.

And that's exactly the kind of story Berkshire has spent decades avoiding.

Buffett didn't touch tech for sixty years in large part because paying up for a growth story that depends on years of heavy, uncertain capital investment is the opposite of how Berkshire operates. So why break the pattern now?

Here's what I think actually happened.

When Alphabet needed $10 billion for its raise, Berkshire didn't buy on the open market — it got invited into the deal. $5 billion of Class A stock at $351.81 a share, $5 billion of Class C at $348.20, both at a 6.5% discount to that day's closing price, plus registration rights thrown in.

That's not a transaction available to any investor buying GOOGL off the exchange, at any size.

But here’s the kicker:

Chances to deploy $10 billion into a single, already-understood, high-quality compounder — at the exact moment that company is raising capital to go on offense — essentially never happen for individual investors.

Berkshire's edge here isn't superior insight into Google's business. It's that when a business you already want more of comes looking for a large check, you can be the one writing it, on terms nobody else gets.

That's an advantage of capital and access, and it's simply not available to retail money at any price. I’ve written before about how every investor operates in different layers of the market — this is that idea playing out in real time.

Which is also, honestly, why I'm not buying.

I don't have $10 billion or a phone call to Alphabet's CFO. I have the price on the screen.

And to be clear, I’m not saying don’t own Alphabet. I’m already heavily exposed to Alphabet via the index funds of my personal account. Maybe even overexposed based on the index weightings. But for a smaller portfolio designed for generating alpha, it doesn’t look like a deal to me.

So for now, I don’t see screaming opportunity. But I’ll keep watching Alphabet and take advantage when I can.