Berkshire Hathaway is the ultimate anti-AI stock
Berkshire is a rare breed in today’s market: a megacap US stock that doesn’t really have a big footprint in AI.
Shares of Berkshire Hathaway are up more than 1% in early trading on Monday after the company reported that its Q1 operating profit rose 18% year on year.
The up day is helping the conglomerate, which just hosted its annual meeting/weekend camp for capitalists, reverse a touch of its worst period of underperformance compared to the S&P 500 since at least 1985, per Bespoke Investment Group.
No wonder management repurchased shares in Q1 for the first time since Q2 2024!
One could point to the imminent exodus of the Oracle of Omaha as a catalyst for its reversal of fortunes. And there would certainly be an element of truth to that.
Warren Buffett announced he’d be stepping down as CEO last May, with Greg Abel taking his place.
“On the Friday before Berkshire’s 60th annual meeting, the stock closed at an all-time high, and three months later, it was down around 15%,” per Bespoke. “In the nine months since then, they haven’t recovered any ground.”
On the one hand, it seems like Berkshire should be one of those “heavy assets, low obsolescence” stocks that should avoid being battered by the AI boom, thanks to having such a heavy industrial footprint (including trains, energy, and aerospace manufacturing) in addition to well-known consumer brands. No matter how powerful AI gets, I’ll still be eating Dairy Queen in my Fruit of the Loom undies. Perhaps even more so, if/when the computers take my job.
On the other hand, Berkshire’s bread and butter is insurance: premiums paid provide powder for investment in other businesses and publicly traded companies. Insurance is an industry often mentioned as being at risk of AI disruption, and Q1 2026 was noteworthy for how much investors were willing to punish perceived AI losers, not just reward its winners. (On that note, Progressive Corp. surpassing Berkshire’s Geico in auto insurance market share has been attributed to, among other things, its superior investment in technology.)
But a close inspection of the fundamentals probably isn’t as useful as a characterization of what this company is, at a more basic level, and how it trades.
Berkshire is a) a very large stock, and b) not an AI stock. For many portfolio managers, being overweight a large-cap AI stock in the Magnificent 7 will effectively mean you have to be underweight one of its peers or another large-cap stock that doesn’t have high exposure to the theme. Oh, and Berkshire’s largest public holding is Apple, a company that is sitting out the AI capex boom!
Among S&P 100 companies, the weekly change in Berkshire’s share price has been the most negatively correlated with Oracle and Advanced Micro Devices over the past quarter. To invert the “cleanest dirty shirt” phrase, that publicly traded hyperscaler and AI chip designer are (with respect) considered to be the worst-tailored tuxedos at their respective balls.
To that end, Berkshire has also been negatively correlated with Goldman Sachs’ long-short high-beta momentum pair. That is, if volatile stocks that usually go up are beating risky stocks that have been trending down, it probably means that Berkshire’s a loser that day as well.
Or, as is the case this morning, the formerly Buffett-led gets to go up while the high-beta momentum trade takes a dip.
