As chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett often expressed his love for businesses with wide moats and durable competitive advantages. This is evident in Berkshire's top holdings and can lead to strong pricing power and consistent earnings growth.
Let's look at three artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure stocks with the widest moats that could get Buffett's stamp of approval.
ASML
ASML (ASML +0.64%) has a monopoly on the technology that makes the entire AI boom possible. A moat doesn't get any wider than that.
It is the only company in the world that can make extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines. In fact, competitors stopped trying to develop their own EUV machines years ago, and only now is China trying to catch up.
NASDAQ: ASML
Key Data Points
These machines use light waves to print the crucial circuitry onto chips and are needed to make advanced logic chips like graphics processing units (GPUs). They are also used to make high-bandwidth memory.
As such, demand for these machines is through the roof. The company is also one of the few that make deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines, which handle the less intricate layers in the chipmaking process.
ASML has also developed a newer technology that will eventually be used to advance chip technology even further, called high NA (numerical aperture) EUV, so it's already well ahead of the curve to push its durable, competitive advantage well into the future.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Given the up-front costs and complexity of manufacturing advanced logic chips, most semiconductor companies today rely on third-party foundries to make them. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM +1.22%) has become the leader in this field through its expertise and scale. As the only foundry that has proved it can consistently produce advanced chips at high yields (few defects) at scale, the company has become a virtual monopoly in the advanced chip manufacturing sector.
As a result, it has become a crucial partner to chipmakers, working in lockstep to help them with their technology road maps. And it has given TSMC (as the company is also known) strong pricing power and great visibility into its business, as it works to expand capacity. And it doesn't matter which chip technology wins out or takes market share, since TSMC manufactures them all.
As a vital cog in the semiconductor value chain, it has established a wide moat with a durable competitive advantage that rivals have been unable to match.
Nvidia
The king of AI infrastructure, Nvidia (NVDA -0.03%), is the dominant player in providing the chips used to train AI models. It established a wide moat in this area through its CUDA software platform.
After developing this software, it smartly seeded CUDA into research centers that were doing early work on AI, which led to nearly all foundational AI code being written on its software and optimized for its GPUs. It then extended its moat through networking with its proprietary NVLink system, which essentially lets its chips act as one powerful unit.
NASDAQ: NVDA
Key Data Points
Nvidia's GPUs continue to be the main chips used to train AI models, but it has since become a complete AI infrastructure company. With the development of its Vera central processing units and its acquisition of Groq and its language processing units, the company now offers complete server racks built specifically for various AI tasks, including training, inference, and agentic AI. That should be its next big growth driver.
Nvidia continues to see hypergrowth despite its size, and its moat among AI chipmakers remains wide, despite starting to see some increased competition. It remains one of the best AI stocks to own.
