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OMAHA, Neb. — The profits of Warren Buffett’s company improved 17% thanks to a relatively mild hurricane season and more paper investment gains this year as Berkshire Hathaway continues to prepare for the legendary 95-year-old investor to relinquish the CEO title in January.

But last month’s $9.7 billion investment in OxyChem won’t do much to diminish the $381.7 billion cash pile that Berkshire was sitting on at the end of September even though it is the biggest deal the company has made in years.

The biggest thing on most investors’ minds right now is that Buffett Vice Chair Greg Abel is set to succeed him as CEO in January, although Buffett will remain chairman at Berkshire. The Class A stock is well off its peak of $812,855, set just before Buffett surprised shareholders at the annual meeting in May by announcing he will step back. It closed Friday at $715,740, but Berkshire still didn’t buy back any of its own stock in the quarter, which suggests Buffett thinks it is still overvalued.

CFRA Research analyst Cathy Seifert said she expects investors will clamor for more details from Berkshire after Abel takes over, and that calls for the company to finally pay a dividend if it can’t find better uses for all that cash will also grow louder. But with Buffett remaining chairman there may not be any immediate changes.

“The lack of discussion and disclosure — I think has a lot of the investment community frustrated,” Seifert said. Berkshire has never had public or investor relations departments, and the company skips the quarterly investor calls that nearly every public company holds. Buffett has long said he prefers to share results with every investor at the same time, on Saturdays, and give them the weekend to digest the results before the markets reopen.

Berkshire said Saturday that it earned $30.796 billion, or $21,413 per Class A share, in the quarter. That’s up from last year’s $26.251 billion, or $18,272 per A share.

But those bottom-line figures are always distorted by the current value of Berkshire’s massive investment portfolio and any stock sales, which this year added $17.3 billion to the company’s profits.

That’s why Buffett has long recommended that investors pay more attention to Berkshire’s operating earnings to get a sense of how its many operating companies are performing, including well-known insurers like Geico, BNSF railroad, several major utilities and an assortment of manufacturing and retail companies.

On that measure, Berkshire’s operating profit jumped to $13.485 billion, or $9376.15 per Class A share, thanks to a strong rebound in its insurance companies. A year ago, Berkshire reported operating earnings of $10.09 billion, or $7,023.01 per Class A share.

The four analysts surveyed by FactSet Research predicted Berkshire would report operating earnings of $8,573.50 per Class A share.

Berkshire said fewer catastrophic losses from hurricanes this year compared to when Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeast a year ago helped its insurance underwriting profit jump $1.6 billion to $2.369 billion. The bottom line was also helped by $331 million in gains on debt held in foreign currencies this year, compared to a $1.1 billion loss on those holdings a year ago.

Most of Berkshire’s other companies performed well in the quarter although profits did decline nearly 9% at its utilities to $1.489 billion.

Asked whether Nvidia intends to sell AI accelerators from that family of products in the Asian country, the tech chief said, “I don’t know. I hope so someday.” 

Huang’s comments came a day after US President Donald Trump said he didn’t discuss the prospect of Blackwell chip sales in a meeting with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, despite saying earlier that he would do so. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, asked whether Blackwell chip sales to China would be discussed more going forward, said “I don’t think that’s on the table right now.”

Huang, speaking Friday in South Korea, expressed optimism that might change. “No decisions have been made, and we’ll see how it turns out,” said Huang, 62, of Nvidia’s Blackwell export plans. “I hope it turns out well.” The Nvidia chief said earlier this week that the company hasn’t applied for Washington’s permission to sell Blackwell chips to China, permits that are required under export controls first imposed in 2022.

Read More: Trump Says Nvidia Chip Talks With Xi Didn’t Cover Blackwell 

The Blackwell family of chips is Nvidia’s latest generation of artificial intelligence semiconductors and the industrial standard for developing and running large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The processors have capabilities that far surpass those of semiconductors that Washington effectively banned from export to China several years ago, as well as anything that’s currently available from Chinese competitors like Huawei Technologies Co. 

Selling those products to China, as Huang hopes to do, would require a dramatic departure from the Trump administration’s stated approach to the tech competition between the world’s two largest economies. Still, the president had put it on the table. Trump said months ago that he’d be open to allowing China shipments of an unspecified, downgraded Blackwell chip. Ahead of his meeting with Xi, Trump said he’d discuss the “super duper” Blackwell accelerators with the Chinese leader — remarks that helped make Nvidia the first $5 trillion business by market value. 

But while Trump and Xi did discuss Nvidia’s access to China in general, Trump said after the meeting, those talks did not touch on Blackwell chip approvals: “We’re not talking about the Blackwell,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “That just came out yesterday.”

Back in Washington, China hawks breathed a sigh of relief. Many US officials had worried that Trump, in an effort to reach a broader trade deal with Beijing, might give away what they consider to be the country’s strongest technological asset — and one with significant national security implications. Concern about Blackwell chip sales to the Asian country is one of the primary motivations behind a bipartisan congressional measure that could have major implications for Huang’s hopes for the China market.

The legislation, an earlier version of which has already passed the Senate, would require chipmakers like Nvidia to prioritize American customers before selling chips to buyers in arms-embargoed countries, including China. Hours after Trump and Xi concluded their meeting, lawmakers introduced the highly-anticipated bill to the US House of Representatives.

One congressional staffer, who requested not to be identified, described a sense of uncertainty akin to a fog of war when asked how Trump’s stance on Blackwell chips was playing on Capitol Hill.

Read More: AI Chip Export Controls Backed by House After Trump-Xi Talks

Nvidia has criticized trade restrictions as hamstringing US competitiveness and lobbied aggressively against chip export controls more broadly. “I think it’s really good for America and it’s really good for China that Nvidia could participate in the Chinese market,” Huang said Friday. Nvidia’s argument is that restricting Chinese AI developers from using American chips will only push them toward domestic alternatives.

To be sure, participating in China would also be really good for Nvidia: the world’s most valuable company wrote down billions of dollars in revenue earlier this year when Trump’s team restricted sales of a less-advanced processor called the H20. Washington later reversed course and greenlit H20 chip shipments, but Beijing has discouraged Chinese companies from using those accelerators.

Trump said Thursday that Nvidia and the Chinese government will have to keep talking about the chipmaker’s access to the Asian nation’s market, which is the world’s biggest for semiconductors. Huang, though, said the topic didn’t come up during his meeting Friday with Ren Hongbin, Chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. 

“We were just talking mostly about enjoying each other’s company,” Huang said.