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Google CEO Sundar Pichai
Google CEO Sundar Pichai (Jakub Porzycki/Getty Images)

Google jumps as Berkshire Hathaway reveals $5.1 billion stake, search giant announces $40 billion investment in Texas data centers

A double dose of big news after the close on Friday.

Luke Kawa

Google popped at the end of last week and is building on those gains in premarket trading on Monday thanks to a double dose of news after the close on Friday. The firm announced plans to bolster its data center footprint and got a long overdue seal of approval from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

The search giant announced plans to invest $40 billion through 2027 to build three data center campuses in Texas, its largest investment in any US state.

That’s another hefty chunk added to the huge and growing pile of AI capital expenditure by the hyperscalers that dominate the S&P 500. And it’s the latest addition to a number of AI-linked investment dollars going to the Lone Star State, with Meta, Anthropic, Fermi, IREN, and Oracle all recently outlining fresh spending commitments or progress on projects in the pipeline.

“Googles $40 billion investment in new data centers in Texas is a further sign of the geographic diversification of Alphabets data-center infrastructure, where its lower token cost advantage stands to aid market share in both enterprise APIs and consumer applications,” wrote Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Mandeep Singh and Robert Biggar. “Increased availability of its TPU chips, both through its own data centers and neoclouds, can hasten the Google Cloud segments share gains in AI workloads vs. hyperscale cloud peers including Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS.”

In addition, Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing showed that the conglomerate amassed a significant position in Alphabet at the end of the third quarter, worth about $5.1 billion after the stock’s jump in after-hours trading on Friday.

Warren Buffett and his since deceased vice chairman, Charlie Munger, lamented on multiple occasions missing out on Google’s meteoric rise, with the Oracle of Omaha noting that its insurance subsidiary Geico was contributing to its ad business success in Google’s early days. At Berkshire’s 2017 annual meeting, Buffett said he “blew it” by passing on Google shortly after its IPO.

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Luke Kawa

Trump Media jumps after announcing plans to distribute digital tokens to shareholders

Trump Media & Technology Group is jumping in premarket trading after the owner of Truth Social announced plans to distribute a digital token to shareholders in partnership with Crypto.com (which is also its partner in the event contracts space).

Shareholders will receive one token per share owned, according to the press release, which can give the holder access to “various rewards” that “may include benefits or discounts tied to Trump Media products.”

This move is a little closer to home for Trump Media, which has effectively been a digital asset treasury, compared to its recent merger with fusion energy company TAE Technologies, which will radically transform the entity.

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Luke Kawa

Nvidia, TSMC rise as the world’s most valuable company reportedly asks for more chips to meet Chinese demand

Nvidia and TSMC are modestly higher in premarket trading Wednesday after Reuters reported that the chip designer asked the Taiwanese chip manufacturing giant to boost production of its H200 AI chips.

Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump said that Nvidia would be able to ship the best-performing processors from its Hopper generation to China, with 25% of the proceeds going to the US government. Per the report, Chinese companies have already placed orders for more than 2 million of these chips in 2026, roughly triple the 700,000 in inventory that Nvidia has in reserve. Reuters added that Nvidia is planning on selling these chips at around $27,000 apiece, which would amount to a more than $54 billion boost in revenues if it’s able to realize all this reported demand. The ability to do so will also depend on Chinese regulators green-lighting purchases. The chip designer’s success in 2025 has come despite being effectively shut out of the Chinese AI market for the year.

The outlet previously reported that Nvidia plans to begin sending these GPUs to China before the Lunar New Year holiday (which starts on February 17, 2026), and that Chinese companies are eagerly awaiting the opportunity to get their hands on these powerful chips.

During Nvidia’s Q3 conference call, which came prior to the Trump announcement, CEO Jensen Huang expressed confidence in his ability to meet demand for the company’s GPUs going forward, saying, “In many cases, we’ve secured a lot of supply for ourselves, because obviously, they’re working with the largest company in the world in doing so.”

Huang’s relationship with critical supply chain partner TSMC appears to benefit from a personal touch: during his November visit to Taiwan, he met with the chipmaker’s CEO, CC Wei, as well as other execs over hot pot, and called TSMC “the pride of the world” the next day.

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Luke Kawa

Nike rises after CEO Elliott Hill purchases $1 million in company stock

Nike is sprinting to the finish line in 2025, up more than 2% in premarket trading after a filing after the close on Tuesday showed that CEO Elliott Hill purchased a little over $1 million in company stock on December 29.

The news comes on the heels of last week’s revelation that Apple CEO and board member Tim Cook bought nearly $3 million in Nike stock.

Hill returned to the company to replace former CEO John Donahoe in October 2024. This is Hill’s only open market purchase of Nike stock during his tenure atop the company.

Shares of the sports apparel maker are still down about 17% year to date.

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