Blackstone plans to invest tens of billions in Google AI chips

Blackstone is reportedly planning to invest tens of billions of dollars to secure massive amounts of Google’s custom AI chip capacity, a dramatic escalation from the $5 billion initial commitment it made just months ago. From $5 billion to tens of billions In May 2026, Blackstone and Alphabet announced a joint venture to create an AI compute company. Google would supply its TPU chips and cloud expertise, Blackstone would bring the capital and infrastructure management muscle, and together they’d offer compute-as-a-service to customers hungry for AI processing power. Blackstone’s initial equity check was $5 billion, buying it a majority stake in the venture. The plan called for bringing 500 megawatts of data center capacity online by 2027. With leverage factored in, the total investment was projected to reach roughly $25 billion. Blackstone is now reportedly targeting investments in the tens of billions to secure additional TPU capacity across multiple gigawatts of data center infrastructure. The venture, internally called Project Braid and later branded as Crux AI, positions Blackstone and Google as direct competitors to companies like CoreWeave, which has built its business around...