Karim's No. 1 Inside Play
for 2026

There's one signal on Wall Street that cuts through all the noise.

Not analyst ratings. Not price targets. Not the talking heads on financial TV.

Insider buying.

When the people who run a company reach into their own pockets – not the firm’s money, not a fund’s money, their own – and buy shares of the very business they manage, they are telling you something they cannot say out loud.

They’re telling you the stock is worth more than the price the market is asking.

And right now, the people who run one of the largest financial firms on the planet are buying their own stock by the tens of millions of dollars.

The company is KKR & Co. (KKR). And it may be the single most compelling insider story of 2026.

I follow a simple discipline when it comes to insider buying. Three rules. All three have to be met before I pay attention.

KKR didn’t just clear all three rules.

Since February, KKR insiders have purchased roughly $46 million worth of their own stock.

And the way they did it is the part that should stop you cold.

These executives were buying more as the price dropped – averaging down with their own capital – at the exact moment they were quietly warning Wall Street that near-term results might come in softer than hoped.

They were managing down expectations with one hand and backing up the truck with the other.

You don’t behave that way unless you are convinced of one thing: that whatever the market is obsessing over this quarter has almost nothing to do with where the business is going over the next several years.

So what do these insiders see that the market doesn't?

To answer that, you have to understand what KKR has quietly become.

Most people still file the firm under "private equity" and picture the leveraged buyouts that made its name decades ago.

That picture is badly out of date.

Artificial intelligence runs on physical infrastructure – enormous data centers and the electricity to power them. The tech giants want all of it. What they don't want is the staggering cost sitting on their own balance sheets.

So they turn to private-capital firms to finance it and own it for them. KKR is one of the firms they turn to.

And the scale is almost hard to believe…

This is the picks-and-shovels play of the AI era.

You don't have to guess which AI model wins. You simply have to own the data centers, the power, and the financing that every winner will need.

That is the position KKR is building – and it is far harder to replicate than it looks.

The clearest expression of KKR's AI strategy has a name: Helix Digital Infrastructure – a brand-new company KKR has launched with more than $10 billion already secured, built to develop and operate AI infrastructure directly. Designing, owning, and running its own data centers, its own power generation, its own transmission.

And look who they put in charge…Adam Selipsky – the former CEO of Amazon Web Services. The man who ran the largest cloud computing business on Earth. A sovereign wealth fund and strategic partners are already backing the venture.

This isn’t a side project. This is KKR planting a flag at the center of the AI buildout.

The picks and shovels are piling up.

Apollo Global Management has been reported to be leading a financing package of roughly $35 billion to help Meta develop data centers across the United States. KKR has been named as part of the investor group, alongside firms like Brookfield, Carlyle, and PIMCO.

And the structure is elegant.

A special-purpose vehicle would finance three to five massive AI data centers – each drawing one to two gigawatts of continuous power. Enough to light a medium-sized city.

Meta would stay on as a tenant with no equity, keeping the whole thing off its books.

The most recent reporting on the Meta deal describes it as preliminary and not guaranteed. KKR is best understood as a reported potential participant, not a confirmed, signed one.

But the template is already proven – when Meta and Blue Owl Capital closed a $27 billion financing for the "Hyperion" data-center campus in Louisiana in October 2025, the largest private-credit transaction ever done, Meta kept just 20% of the venture. Blue Owl-managed funds owned 80%.

The tech giants are handing the cost of the AI buildout to private capital.

And that is precisely the business KKR is leaning into.

None of this matters if the underlying business is weak… So let’s anchor the story in real results.

KKR's first-quarter 2026 results, reported on May 5, beat Wall Street across the board.

On the earnings call, management walked back its full-year ambitions, signaling that the $7-per-share target was now more likely to land below that level because of delayed monetizations – slower exits from existing investments.

Co-CEO Scott Nuttall pushed back on the gloom, arguing that the market’s perception of volatility in the business is disconnected from how the firm actually experiences it.

Meanwhile, the capital-return machine never slowed.

KKR spent $317 million buying back 3.5 million shares, raised its dividend to $0.195 per share – an increase every single year since its 2018 conversion to a corporation – and lifted its buyback authorization by another $500 million.

Here's the gap the insiders are exploiting…

Wall Street fixated on a trimmed near-term target and a wave of private-credit jitters. The stock sold off.

The people running the firm looked at the exact same picture – saw record scale and a deliberate pivot toward steadier, longer-lasting earnings – and bought the dip with their own money.

When the short-term story and the long-term story split that far apart, ask yourself which one the insiders are betting on.

Step back, and a single through-line connects everything: the insider buying, the AI infrastructure push, the softer near-term guidance.

KKR is deliberately remaking itself.

It’s moving away from the lumpy, boom-and-bust rhythm of traditional private equity – where earnings lurch with the timing of deal exits – and toward long-duration, durable capital that throws off steadier fees year after year.

Retail wealth products. Insurance assets. Longer-term ownership of operating companies.

The delayed monetizations that dented this quarter’s guidance? In a sense, that’s the visible cost of the transition – the old engine sputtering while the new, steadier one gets wired in.

That is the longer game the insiders are playing.

Put the pieces together, and the case for KKR stops feeling like a bet. It starts feeling like a conclusion.

Follow the insiders. In this case, they've already shown you exactly where they're putting their own money – loudly, repeatedly, and with conviction.