Two major investors have made AI trades that look like opposites. Berkshire Hathaway disclosed a large new stake in Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Thiel Macro, sold its entire stake in Nvidia, the AI chip leader. Read together, the trades point the same way, toward companies that can show AI improving their margins and resilience.
Berkshire’s November 2025 filing of its holdings, reported by Reuters, puts the Alphabet stake at $4.3 billion to $4.9 billion. That makes it one of the group’s ten largest stock holdings. For an investor known for caution on fast-growing tech, it is a rare move into big technology stocks. Alphabet’s shares hit record highs after the disclosure, and news reports treated the stake as an endorsement of Google’s reset around AI.
The Financial Times reported that Berkshire is also trimming Apple, its top holding. The group is swapping part of a bet on mature tech earnings for one on lasting cash flows from AI. For a value-focused investor, that suggests confidence that Alphabet can turn its AI models, data and infrastructure into real operating profit.
Thiel Macro’s trade looks like the reverse. The Nvidia shares the fund sold in the third quarter of 2025 were worth $85 million to $100 million. That is significant on its own, but a small slice of Thiel’s multibillion-dollar portfolio and negligible next to Nvidia’s market value of several trillion dollars. The fund kept its shares in Apple and Microsoft, two companies building AI deeply into their products. The trade moved the fund’s risk along the AI value chain, out of a chip stock that many investors had crowded into.
Both trades fit what OECD research on AI and productivity finds. Productivity gains come when companies combine AI tools with the right data, infrastructure, skills and workflows. Companies that do this well see lasting improvements in performance, while for those that do not, AI only adds cost and complexity.
Investors are starting to price in that difference. Companies using AI to cut costs, get more work done and reduce error rates are attracting patient capital. Those relying on vague announcements, with no visible improvement in unit economics, carry more risk as investors move money within the sector.
