Berkshire (BRK.B) will power AI data centers on three conditions. Community consent is one of them.

Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) chief executive Greg Abel called supplying power to AI data centers a "significant opportunity for Berkshire and Berkshire Hathaway Energy," then set out three conditions the company attaches to serving them. He has put the same terms to hyperscalers, state officials and regulators.

In the same CNBC "Squawk Box" interview, Abel described a second route into AI, Berkshire's stake in Google parent Alphabet, which the network valued at almost $36 billion. The interview aired live on Wednesday and CNBC published it in full on Friday.

The first is price protection for everybody else. "We are interested in serving these hyperscalers, one, if there was no impact to the rates of our other customers," Abel said. "And in fact, we've pretty much taken the approach there has to be a net benefit to our customers."

The second is water. "The communities have to understand the impact on water," he said, adding that the issue "has become much more manageable" as operators adopt technologies that cut usage.

The third is consent. "The communities have to be open to having the data center in their community," Abel said. "We very much believe in the fact that you have to be a welcomed member of the community."

He said that is getting harder. "There is a lot more pushback in the communities across the U.S.," Abel said, though he added that Berkshire has not yet lost a site over it. "We have not had any specific site rejected to date." Construction is continuing across the sites the company has underway. We reported last month on a New Jersey data center found running 45 unpermitted gas generators.

Abel has argued for years that power, not silicon, sets the pace. "I've sort of always had a strong view that energy would be the constraint," he said. "We can produce the energy." What he described as the real bottleneck is site readiness, meaning how long it takes to prepare land and infrastructure to the point where it can actually serve a data center.

He put a figure on what Berkshire Hathaway Energy already carries. In Iowa, where the utility has a substantial operation, "approximately 8 percent of our load came from data centers" last year. He said incremental load is still coming on, both from customers requesting service and from what the utility is able to supply.

Berkshire's role stops at the fence line. Abel said its sites "would be the energy infrastructure, not the data center site."

In response to local opposition, Abel pointed to the tax revenue reaching counties. In Iowa, still a heavily agricultural state, Abel said property tax relief and revenues supporting schools, police and fire have been "very, very substantial" in places where the energy infrastructure and a data center both went in.

Berkshire's other AI bet is Alphabet

Selling electricity is one of the two routes Abel described. The second is equity. Berkshire's largest direct equity bet on AI is Alphabet (GOOGL), a position CNBC valued at almost $36 billion and now the third-largest holding in the portfolio. Berkshire began building the position under Warren Buffett roughly 15 months ago. We covered the second-quarter filing that showed Berkshire nearly doubling the stake.

Abel described how the biggest piece came together. On a Sunday morning in late May he took a call offering Berkshire a block in a large Alphabet equity raise. "They hadn't set the size but recommended that we consider 10 billion," he said, meaning $10 billion. He phoned Buffett, the two discussed size and pricing, and Abel recommended a 6.5% discount. Alphabet was raising $80 billion at the time to fund what it called investments in its "world-class AI compute infrastructure to meet its unprecedented customer demand."

Asked why Google, Abel pointed at what Berkshire sees inside its own operating companies. He and Buffett knew AI was "going to have a significant impact on America and businesses," he said, and "we saw Google as a significant player."