👀 Google Called Buffett First

OpenAI and Anthropic could be two of the biggest AI IPOs Wall Street has seen in years.

But investors don’t have to wait for those names to hit the public markets to get exposure to the AI boom.

MarketBeat’s 7 AI Stocks to Buy Now report reveals 7 publicly traded companies already positioned to benefit as the next wave of AI investment moves beyond the private model providers.

These are the stocks investors can buy today, before the IPO crowd rushes in.

See the 7 stocks

Berkshire just bought $10 billion of Alphabet $GOOG ( ▲ 0.53% ) at 6.5% off.

That's about $650 million of instant paper gain, negotiated on a phone call between two men who were reportedly not in a hurry.

And the weirdest part? Alphabet asked them.

Buffett started buying Alphabet around 15 months ago, quietly, the way he does everything.

Then Alphabet came back with an offer: a block of shares in its upcoming equity raise.

Abel and Buffett negotiated. Final terms: $10 billion, 6.5% below market.

Which is a lot of money to leave on the table unless you badly want a buyer who never panic-sells.

Greg Abel told CNBC on Wednesday that powering AI hyperscalers is "a significant opportunity for Berkshire."

Here's the tell: in Iowa last year, roughly 8% of Berkshire Hathaway Energy's load already went to data centres.

Nearly a tenth of the electricity, going to buildings full of humming metal.

Berkshire isn't planning to build the data centres. It wants to own the wires, the turbines and the substations feeding them.

Selling shovels during a gold rush, except the shovels are regulated utilities with guaranteed returns.

Abel laid out exactly what a hyperscaler has to clear before Berkshire plugs it in:

Local resistance to data centres is rising across the country. Abel's response: not one Berkshire site has been rejected so far.

Helps that Berkshire's sites are power infrastructure. Angry town halls tend to aim at the server farm, not the substation.

Berkshire has found two ways to own AI without writing a single line of code.

One is a $10 billion equity stake bought at a discount. The other is a utility business that gets paid whether the AI bubble inflates or pops.

Electricity demand doesn't care which model wins. It just goes up.

The catch: utilities move at the speed of regulators, and 8% of one state's load is a long way from a national thesis. This is a slow compounding story, not a moonshot.

Buffett's successor just told you where he thinks the next decade of Berkshire earnings comes from. Worth listening.

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US companies are defaulting at 4.0%, and the bond market is acting like it's a normal Wednesday.

That's the US speculative-grade default rate. The 20-year median is 2.9%.

So defaults are running well hotter than normal, and the broad credit market has priced in roughly none of it.

Longview Economics calls this a "highly unusual divergence." Understatement of the quarter.

Spreads on the riskiest corporate debt, the stuff rated CCC and lower, are widening markedly. That's the market quietly charging more to lend to companies it suspects won't make it.

Meanwhile, the broader US high-yield index is sitting at near-record, multi-decade-tight levels. Cheapest borrowing costs in a generation.

Both things. Same asset class. Same week.

Picture a cruise ship where the lower deck is already taking on water while the top deck orders another round.

And this isn't confined to America. European defaults are running at 4.6% against a 2.3% historical median. Double the long-run norm.

State Street's Q3 2026 credit outlook puts the warning politely. Current spread levels "may now embed a relatively benign macro path and leave limited cushion for fundamental deterioration."

In plain English? The market has priced in everything going fine, and nothing going wrong.

Awkward timing, because the Fed has spent the last week hinting at hikes. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh flagged inflation concerns at Jackson Hole, and markets now treat a September rate hike as the base case.

Middle East tensions are roaring back on top of that, dragging energy prices up with them.

For a debt-heavy company, that's the worst possible combination. Higher cost of capital, weaker cash flow, same enormous interest bill arriving every quarter.

State Street's version: for highly leveraged issuers, that mix "could become increasingly difficult to absorb."

That's the whole question. Either the weakest borrowers get rescued by an economy that stays friendly, or the broad market eventually notices what the CCC tier already knows and reprices hard.

State Street is leaning one way. Conditions "appear sufficient for a meaningful default cycle in certain areas of the credit markets, even absent a recession."

A default cycle without a recession is a rare and specific thing. It means the pain comes from balance sheets and interest costs rather than a collapse in demand.

Tight spreads mean you're being paid almost nothing to take credit risk right now. That's the actual read here.

High-yield bond funds, leveraged loan funds, and the debt-heavy small caps in your portfolio are all sitting on the same assumption: rates come down, cash flows hold up, nobody blows up.

Warsh just made the first part look shakier.

The bottom of the credit market has already started pricing the risk. The question is how long the top can keep pretending it hasn't.

300 accounts. One bank. And now a US senator wants the paperwork.

Capital One $COF ( ▲ 2.49% ) shut more than 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021.

Most people have three or four accounts. This was north of 300.

And nobody outside the bank has seen the reasoning. That's the fight.

March 2025: Trump's privately-owned conglomerate sued Capital One, saying the closures were political "debanking".

Last month the bank finally gave its version. It closed the accounts after an anti-money-laundering review.

The wording matters. Capital One never accused the Trump Organization of actually laundering anything. Its defence is process: months of analysis by its AML team, in line with bank policy and regulatory guidance.

Which is the corporate way of saying "we were following the checklist."

Then a senator asked to see the checklist

Democratic senator Maggie Hassan wrote to Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank yesterday evening.

She wants the transactions, the alerts, whatever triggered the review, and any communications with law enforcement or regulators.

"The American people deserve to know," she wrote.

Great. A compliance file built to sit in a vault forever might end up on the internet.

Trump has said JPMorgan $JPM ( ▲ 0.36% ) and Bank of America $BAC ( ▲ 0.98% ) closed his accounts and refused him new ones after the Capitol riots at the end of his first term. Wells Fargo $WFC ( ▲ 2.56% ) is reportedly on the list too.

The DOJ has already subpoenaed banks over debanking claims.

So this stopped being one bank's lawsuit a while ago.

None of this dents Capital One's earnings next quarter. It's headline risk and legal bills, not a business model problem.

The rulebook is the actual story. Banks currently close accounts quietly with no explanation, largely because AML rules push them to stay silent.

If Washington rewires that, every large bank picks up new disclosure duties, new legal exposure, and a longer queue of lawsuits.

It lands on regular people too. Small businesses and individuals get "de-risked" every week with a form letter and zero reason given.

Hassan's letter is a request, not a subpoena. Fairbank can politely decline.

What would change the picture: Capital One handing the documents over, or the DOJ probe forcing them into the open. Until then it's a very expensive staring contest.