As technology companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on data centers, semiconductors, and other power infrastructure, investors are wondering whether the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution can sustain its momentum.
What happens if AI spending slows? Or if businesses realize that their investments aren’t generating the returns they expected?
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These are important questions, especially for investors looking to buy stocks and hold them for decades. Warren Buffett built his fortune by choosing companies with durable competitive advantages, predictable earnings, and management teams capable of allocating capital wisely. Rather than speculating on the next technological breakthrough, Buffett prefers companies that thrive across different economic cycles.
Two stocks in Berkshire Hathaway‘s portfolio fit those criteria particularly well: Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG). While both companies stand to benefit from AI, their investment cases do not depend entirely on the technology succeeding.
Apple: A consumer technology powerhouse with an AI option
Berkshire first started investing in Apple in 2016, long before generative AI became Wall Street’s favorite investment theme. At the time, Buffett recognized something most investors were discounting: Apple wasn’t simply a hardware manufacturer. The company had acquired an extremely loyal customer base, possessed a powerful brand, and built a product ecosystem that kept customers sticky.
That combination creates what Buffett calls an economic moat, a durable competitive advantage that helps a company protect its profits. Nearly a decade later, Apple’s business remains remarkably resilient. Instead of creating a new product every few years, Apple has found different ways to monetize its platform.
For example, the company’s Services segment includes the App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, AppleCare, and other offerings that generate recurring revenue from Apple’s installed base of billions of devices worldwide. This is highly attractive because Apple’s customers do not need to purchase a new iPhone every year for the company to generate incremental revenue.
What makes Apple so different from other speculative AI investments is that the company doesn’t really need AI to become its largest revenuetomers to upgrade. But the company’s established hardware business, expanding services ecosystem, and powerful brand already support substantial earnings and cash flow
