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 inside the Google Cloud software suite. TPUs offer customers an alternative to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, which accounted for a 92% share of the market as of Q3 2025, according to a report by Jon Peddie Research, a market research firm.
Google has been making up ground. Anthropic announced in October it would expand its use of Google’s TPUs to as many as 1 million chips in a deal worth “tens of billions of dollars,” bringing more than a gigawatt of capacity online in 2026.
Blackstone had already found one route into the compute trade through its private credit arm.
In 2023, it joined alternative investment manager Magnetar Capital in arranging a $2.3 billion debt facility for CoreWeave, which supplies GPU infrastructure, secured against Nvidia chips. It followed up in 2024 with a $7.5 billion package to expand the Nvidia-backed cloud provider’s AI infrastructure.
The Google venture now puts Blackstone in the equity seat, no longer just as a lender, on a platform built around custom-built TPU chips.
It would also allow Blackstone to own the compute that sits inside data centers, not just the bricks and mortar, of which it has acquired a lot over the past five years.
The asset manager took Virginia-based Quality Technology Services private in 2021 in a roughly $10 billion deal.
In 2024, Blackstone agreed to acquire hyperscaler AirTrunk in a transaction valued at more than A$24 billion, or around $17 billion, and has backed other hyperscale developments through partnerships with businesses such as real estate investment trust Digital Realty.
Infrastructure investors are familiar with land, power, fiber and data centers. Compute is harder to get your hands around, as it bundles fast-depreciating hardware, software, customer contracts and enormous power demand into a product that looks partly like cloud services and partly like infrastructure. Blackstone acknowledged these challenges in the statement.
