By Esther Luz
Publication Date: 2026-05-19 23:18:00
Google and Blackstone have formed a joint venture to offer AI data center capacity, networking and computer hardware as a “compute-as-a-service product,” the asset manager said.
The tie-up opens a new avenue in the rush of private equity into AI infrastructure, moving it beyond data centers and into the business of financing compute itself.
Blackstone is making an initial $5 billion equity commitment, with the first 500 megawatts of capacity expected online in 2027, the firm said in a statement.
Google will supply tensor processing units—chips built by the tech giant for training and running AI networks—along with hardware, software and services. Blackstone brings equity capital, project debt, power procurement and institutional relationships.
Benjamin Treynor Sloss, a longtime Google infrastructure executive, will run the new venture.
The deal is partly a way for Google to expand the market for its TPUs, AI chips that until now have lived almost entirely…