Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett helped turn the investment conglomerate into one of the world’s most valuable companies. With a market capitalization of approximately $1.08 trillion as of this writing, Berkshire ranks as the world’s 11th-biggest business (at the time of this writing).

Given Berkshire’s incredible success, it’s little wonder that many investors pay close attention to the company’s stock holdings and strategies. Read on to see why two Motley Fool contributors think that these Berkshire Hathaway portfolio components stand out as great buys right now.

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One of Buffett’s favorites

Jennifer Saibil (Apple): Warren Buffett has been selling Apple (AAPL 0.28%) stock left and right, so I might be going against the grain to say that Apple is one of his best stocks to buy today. But Buffett himself is a contrarian investor, so I’m only following in his footsteps.

In any case, Apple is still the largest stock in the portfolio, accounting for more than a fifth of the total, so Buffett hasn’t lost confidence in it at all. He has said he would never sell as long as he’s controlling Berkshire Hathaway, but that time is coming to an end, and investors are already speculating as to whether Greg Abel will keep it in the portfolio.

But many of the same reasons Buffett originally bought it still hold today. Apple has a large and differentiated consumer products business with a sticky ecosystem, and loyal fans purchase an assortment of its devices, which easily connect to each other. Although it’s often labeled as a tech business, which isn’t in Buffett’s wheelhouse, it’s at least as much the kind of consumer products business that he loves. The tech part also gives him exposure to artificial intelligence (AI), which may not be the reason he bought it, but is a reason many other investors might find it exciting.

So far, Apple Intelligence has disappointed investors. Apple hasn’t released AI services that stand out, and it doesn’t have a strong timeline for when it will.

Still, the recent debut of its newest iPhone, the iPhone Air, demonstrates why fans love Apple and rush to buy its latest launches. It’s the thinnest smartphone on the market, and the design appeals to style-conscious users who often wear their devices as statement pieces. Apple just debuted several new launches that will go on sale later this month, including the new iPhone17 that ramps up the quality and capabilities users love and pay up for, and new AirPods that use Apple Intelligence to translate language in real time.

In other words, Apple is still on top of its game, and it isn’t likely that its customers are going anywhere else anytime soon. However, Apple stock fell after the new products were announced, and it’s down 10% this year. The market didn’t seem to think its launches had enough innovation, especially with AI. That makes this a great opportunity to buy on the dip for the long-term investor.

Amazon stock still looks like a great long-term play

Keith Noonan (Amazon): Like Apple, Amazon (AMZN -1.34%) stock has been a high-profile tech-sector underperformer in 2025. The e-commerce and cloud computing giant’s share price is up just 2% across this year’s trading. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 index’s level has risen roughly 15%, and the Nasdaq Composite‘s level has surged approximately 18%.

Also like Apple, Amazon is also part of Berkshire Hathaway’s stock portfolio. Coming in at just 0.7% of Berkshire’s public stock holdings, Amazon occupies a relatively small position in the investment conglomerate’s portfolio — but I think the tech leader stands out as a strong long-term investment at today’s prices.

Trading at roughly 33.5 times this year’s expected earnings, Amazon admittedly still has a growth-dependent valuation. On the other hand, the extent to which the stock has underperformed the broader market in recent years points to an opportunity. For reference, the company’s share price has risen just 43% over the last five years. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite have both more than doubled across that stretch.

There are some good reasons behind the underperformance. For starters, the company’s e-commerce business faced some substantial headwinds from supply chain disruptions and inflationary trends connected to the pandemic. With the majority of the company’s sales still coming from its e-commerce business, Amazon is also facing some pressures from tariffs.

On the other hand, Amazon remains one of the world’s strongest businesses — and it’s likely in the early stages of capitalizing on AI-related tailwinds that power incredible new growth phases. The growth catalysts that AI can present for the company’s cloud-infrastructure services business seem to be acknowledged but still broadly underappreciated. Meanwhile, the market seems to be largely overlooking the transformative impact that AI and robotics will have on margins for its e-commerce business. With Amazon positioned to benefit from powerful tech trends, the stock looks like a smart buy while it’s still a market laggard.

Warren Buffett will step down from his role as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year. Although his legendary decade-long tenure is coming to an end, investors can still learn a great deal by studying the man’s investing philosophy and examining the conglomerate’s famous portfolio, which contains many excellent buy-and-hold options.

Two of the top picks among Berkshire Hathaway’s 41 holdings are Amazon (AMZN 0.23%) and Visa (V 1.19%). These market leaders have the potential to deliver superior returns over the next decade.

Here is why.

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1. Amazon

Amazon is a highly profitable company with U.S. and international operations in e-commerce, grocery shopping, video and music streaming, advertising, and cloud computing. However, outside of its cloud operations, the company’s business is relatively low-margin.

In the second quarter, Amazon’s North America and international segments had operating margins of 7.5% and 4.1%, respectively. Here’s the good news: In the next decade, e-commerce should continue expanding internationally, granting significant growth prospects to these parts of Amazon’s business.

In the meantime, the company will seek to improve its margins by implementing artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives across its operations. The company has deployed more than a million industrial robots in its warehouses to that end. Amazon’s North America and international segments generate hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue. Even modest margin improvements annually over the long run could have a meaningful impact on the company’s bottom line.

Then there is Amazon’s fast-growing cloud unit. It is responsible for most of the company’s operating and net income, thanks to its much juicier margins. With a suite of AI services whose demand continues to grow, Amazon Web Services should maintain this momentum for the foreseeable future. Lastly, some of Amazon’s newer initiatives are expected to make a meaningful impact in the next decade as well.

Consider the company’s Amazon Pharmacy. The U.S. prescription drug market is expected to be worth approximately $374 billion in revenue this year. Amazon boasts 180 million Prime members in the U.S. and offers a range of perks, including fast and free shipping, allowing patients to avoid the long lines at pharmacies. If the company can scale this business and the rest of its healthcare operations, it could have a meaningful impact on its results by 2035.

Even without that, though, Amazon’s prospects for the next decade look highly attractive. Investors can safely add shares of the e-commerce specialist and hold onto them for a long time.

2. Visa

Visa owns one of the world’s leading global payment networks. The company facilitates credit and debit card transactions, earning a fee for each. So, every time anyone swipes or taps a card branded with Visa’s logo, the company pockets a percentage of the transaction amount. That’s quite the business model.

To get an idea of the scale of Visa’s business, consider that there are about 5 billion of its branded cards in circulation across some 200 countries, and the company supports hundreds of billions of transactions annually and trillions in total payment volume.

The result: Visa generates consistent revenue and profits, and it has for the past decade. The company also boasts a high-margin business. Visa’s network infrastructure is already in place and can support its transaction volume with minimal additional cost.

The financial specialist also avoids the headaches associated with credit risk, as it does not issue the credit card itself. This also means it doesn’t receive money from interest. Still, Visa’s fee-based, capital-light model yields gross and net margins of around 80% and 50%, respectively, which is exceptional for a company of its size.

Although Visa has already achieved tremendous success, there is still plenty of room to grow, as the world increasingly requires digital (non-cash or check) methods of payment. Besides the fact that cash is clunky and less convenient to carry in high amounts than a credit card, the growth of e-commerce is also playing a role in this, since cash is an option in physical retail stores, but digital methods of payment are practically mandatory on e-commerce platforms.

Visa still estimates there’s trillions worth of cash and check transactions to bring into its ecosystem. The company should ride that wave in the next decade and deliver excellent returns along the way.

Amazon says it’s investing more than a $1 billion to raise wages and lower the cost of health care plans for its U.S. fulfillment and transportation workers.

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Price: $17.69

“I have two [questions] for you on AWS; they’re a little tough but I’m going to throw them at you,” Nowak told Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. “There is a Wall Street finance person narrative right now that AWS is falling behind in Gen AI with concerns about share loss to peers. What is your rebuttal to that and talk to us about your and the team’s most important focal points just to ensure that AWS stays on the knife’s edge of innovation versus hyperscaler peers?”

Nowak also pressed Jassy on why it wouldn’t be fair to assume that AWS’ revenue growth shouldn’t accelerate in the back half of the year given all of AWS’ generative AI offerings and widespread demand from companies of all sizes to cash in on this transformational technology.

Jassy responded by stressing that this is the early stages of a technological transformation that will extend far into the future. While some of the top frontier model providers do use AWS in some capacity, non-AI AWS customers that are rushing to build generative and agentic AI services using AWS are “quite early, and many of them are just smaller in terms of usage relative to some of those top heavy applications I mentioned earlier.” That is bound to change.

So if you follow Jassy’s thinking, as more enterprises figure out what they want to build and how they want to build it, they’re going to start having different needs. For the largest model makers, like Open AI or Anthropic, Jassy foresees their costs shifting from a mix between training their models and the cost associated with “inference,” or the customer-facing part where the model spits out a prediction, answer or action, to mostly inference expenses. And Jassy maintains AWS is positioned well for this transition because of the low-cost AI chip line Trainium.

“It’s about 30% and 40% better price performance than the other GPU providers out there right now, and we’re already working on our third version,” he said.

For others, who want to use another company’s model to create their own generative AI applications, Jassy argued that Amazon Bedrock, which offers models from a wide selection of companies, has become a go-to destination and “is growing very substantially.”

Jassy continued on the this-is-just-the-first-inning thread, by noting that companies are just starting to think about deploying AI agents and that, with its recent agentic AI announcements, AWS will be well-positioned to capitalize.

The Amazon CEO, and former AWS chief, added that AWS cloud leadership position also provides some lock-in as AI “inference” becomes just another component of a company’s cloud services stack.

“[P]eople are going to actually want to run those [AI] applications close to where their other applications are running, where their data is,” Jassy said. “There’s just so many more applications and data running in AWS than anywhere else.”

As for Nowak’s question about the possibility of AWS’ growth rate accelerating in the back half of the year, Jassy wouldn’t directly answer it but stressed his optimism, in part stemming from AWS customers starting to deploy more AI products at scale that should continue to ramp in coming quarters.

Earlier in the call, Jassy had defended AWS’ 18% revenue growth rate in light of Microsoft reporting 34% annual revenue growth for its Azure cloud unit and Alphabet recently reporting 32% quarterly growth for Google Cloud. Azure generates around 2/3 the revenue that AWS does, while Google Cloud registers less than half the annual revenue of Amazon’s cloud behemoth.

“You look at the business, it’s a $123 billion annual revenue run rate business and it’s still early,” he said. “How often do you have an opportunity that’s $123 billion in annual revenue run rate where you say it’s still early? It’s a very unusual opportunity that we’ve very bullish about.”