Title: Berkshire CEO Greg Abel: Alphabet a 'significant player' in AI after growing stake in Q2 Show: CNBC (Squawk Box, from Tokyo) Guest: Greg Abel, Berkshire Hathaway CEO (interviewed by Becky Quick) Date: 2026-09-02 URL: https://youtu.be/-X2wrr397dg Length: 7:42 Note: ALL-CAPS closed-caption auto-transcript normalised to sentence case (proper nouns restored: Warren, Berkshire, Alphabet, Google, Tokyo, Kiewit, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Iowa, CNBC); stutters and pure fillers removed, wording otherwise verbatim. The captions end mid-sentence at 07:16 of the 07:42 clip — the last ~25 seconds are not captured here.
00:00 …various trading houses, we do see nice increases in the underlying returning capital. They're delivering back to shareholders. >> Greg, we spoke with Warren Buffett back in July right here on CNBC and talk to him about a lot of things. But one of the interesting things he brought up was the Berkshire portfolio.
00:21 Obviously, you're running things. He said that you're the decision maker, but that you all talk frequently, almost daily, and that the position that was initiated in Alphabet, he said, was his. I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about your relationship with Warren, how you all are doing and how you're managing that portfolio at this point.
00:41 The stock portfolio for Berkshire. >> Yeah, great. Well, a great example of it is Warren turned 96 on Sunday. So before I left to come to Tokyo, stopped in, had a great celebration with Warren as he turned 96 with his family and friends. So we had a very nice afternoon after that. Flew here to Tokyo and.
01:14 And Warren absolutely loves the Japanese investments in the companies we've invested in. So I could tell it wasn't easy for Warren that off I went to Tokyo. But yeah, we have a great working relationship in that we discuss a variety of things on a regular basis. So we had some discussions even on Sunday about our Japanese investments.
01:43 And I talked to him earlier this morning just to give him an update on how each of the meetings went and how the companies are performing. But it's very much just a dialog we've always had. We love talking business. We love talking about what we're seeing across our portfolio. And you're absolutely right, relative to the Alphabet position, Warren initiated that probably close to 15 months ago or a little bit more.
02:14 And so he initiated the initial purchases in Alphabet. We continued or he continued, and we discussed it then and continue to discuss it, initiated a variety of purchases. And then I want to say, in late May, I received a call on a Sunday morning to see if we wanted to participate in their upcoming equity offering.
02:42 Really, no terms or amount were set. And I said, well, I'd get back to him right away and very much consistent with how we manage Berkshire, but also how we the governance around it. I called Warren and I said we had a significant opportunity to invest in, continued invest in Google, but with a significant block.
03:05 Discussed the size. They hadn't set the size, but recommended that we consider 10 billion and more. Warren and I discussed the size. We discussed the size of discount, and I'd recommended 6.5% discount. And we were comfortable with that. And we went back to them and highlighted we would be interested in a block on those terms and then ultimately consummated the transaction.
03:31 >> Why do you like Alphabet? >> I think from just from a real high level, obviously, we don't discuss the underlying specifics of any of the concepts in or around any of our equity investments. But the one thing that is unique with Alphabet, and I guess we do see this across our other businesses, but number one, obviously we all are seeing and feeling the impact of AI.
04:01 So we knew it was going to have a significant impact on America and businesses. We have a lot of visibility from within our companies as to how we're using AI, what type of benefits it's delivering. So that brought incremental interest. And then we saw Google as a significant player. Now there's a lot more to Google than what I just said and why we like it.
04:28 But those were the fundamental reasons as to why we took a serious look at Google and now have a significant investment in it. >> Well, let me ask you a little more about AI and the data center buildout that's taking place. You're somebody who spent decades working in infrastructure building at Kiewit and also at Berkshire Energy.
04:53 So you understand one of the key places that's seen as a limiting factor for AI buildout, and that's energy. Where are we right now in terms of that data center buildout? Where do you see opportunities specifically for Berkshire? >> Yeah. So it's really interesting as they continue to announce all the data centers and data center sites, I've sort of always had a strong view that energy would be the constraint and there'd be energy.
05:24 We can produce the energy. It's. Do we have a how long it would take to get the sites prepared and being in a position they could serve the data centers. And I continue to see that as a big constraint. Will come to one of the other challenges. So, but we do still see it as a significant opportunity for Berkshire and Berkshire Hathaway Energy in that, for example, if you look at Iowa, where we have a number of data centers, I want to say last year, approximately 8% of our load came from data centers.
05:58 And we see incremental load coming on, both customers requesting it and what we can serve. But we've really operated to some pretty basic principles right from the get go. And we've shared that with each of the hyperscalers. And it's really policy. We've discussed with our state, our governors and our regulators.
06:23 And we highlighted we are interested in serving these hyperscalers. One, if there was no impact to the rates of our other customers. And in fact, we've pretty much taken the approach. There has to be a net benefit to our customers. The communities have to understand the impact on water.
06:47 And that has become much more manageable as they address that and use the technologies that are available to minimize water use. And then lastly, the communities have to be open to having the data center in their community. We very much believe in the fact that you have to be a welcomed member of the community.
07:16 Now, that's a decision the data center has to make. But we can encourage them to seriously evaluate where the reaction from the communities. And I know you've had many discussions around it. There is a lot more pushback in the communities across the US. We have not had any specific site rejected to date. We're continuing to move forward on the various sites we…
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