Warren Buffett has completed it again. This time it seems like it may be an accident, but who actually knows how his genius works.
The Oracle of Omaha, now 96, stepped down as Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman last week, with a monitor report of investing in mundane industries like insurance coverage, railroads and utilities. They don’t have the flash of the huge AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, but turns out it didn’t matter. The actual AI windfall is coming from somewhere nobody would guess: energy firms.
In 2000, Berkshire purchased MidAmerican Energy, a utility serving Iowa and the Midwest, with zero thought of artificial intelligence. Today, Iowa is a main information middle hub, and AI’s large urge for food for electrical energy has turned that decades-old deal into one of Berkshire’s sharpest AI performs. “Sometimes in business, boring is what makes the most consistent profits,” Ken Mahoney, president and CEO of Mahoney Asset Management, instructed CNN.
It gets higher. Berkshire’s 2016 buy of Precision Castparts, a producer of turbine elements, went so badly that Buffett admitted he’d paid “too much,” forcing an $11 billion write-down. Now generators are one of the industry’s largest bottlenecks for powering information facilities.
None of this was deliberate. “There was no talk of leveraging AI as part of this strategy,” says Cathy Seifert of CFRA Research. “This was a little bit of luck and good fortune.”
Warren Buffett has completed it again. This time it seems like it may be an accident, but who actually knows how his genius works.
The Oracle of Omaha, now 96, stepped down as Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman last week, with a monitor report of investing in mundane industries like insurance coverage, railroads and utilities. They don’t have the flash of the huge AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, but turns out it didn’t matter. The actual AI windfall is coming from somewhere nobody would guess: energy firms.
In 2000, Berkshire purchased MidAmerican Energy, a utility serving Iowa and the Midwest, with zero thought of artificial intelligence. Today, Iowa is a main information middle hub, and AI’s large urge for food for electrical energy has turned that decades-old deal into one of Berkshire’s sharpest AI performs. “Sometimes in business, boring is what makes the most consistent profits,” Ken Mahoney, president and CEO of Mahoney Asset Management, instructed CNN.
It gets higher. Berkshire’s 2016 buy of Precision Castparts, a producer of turbine elements, went so badly that Buffett admitted he’d paid “too much,” forcing an $11 billion write-down. Now generators are one of the industry’s largest bottlenecks for powering information facilities.
None of this was deliberate. “There was no talk of leveraging AI as part of this strategy,” says Cathy Seifert of CFRA Research. “This was a little bit of luck and good fortune.”