Google and Blackstone form AI cloud venture backed by $5 billion to challenge CoreWeave

Google and Blackstone are creating a standalone AI cloud company that will sell Google’s proprietary TPU chips to outside customers, with Blackstone contributing $5 billion in equity for a majority stake. Including leverage, the total investment reaches $25 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported. Benjamin Treynor Sloss, a longtime Google executive, will run the unnamed US venture as CEO.

The company targets 500 megawatts of computing capacity by 2027 with plans to scale beyond that. Blackstone and Google have already identified data centers that will fold into the venture, some still under construction.

Customers will be able to access TPUs through the new company in addition to using them through Google Cloud, per Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

This joint venture with Blackstone helps meet growing demand for TPUs, which are optimized specifically for efficiency and performance in the AI era

Kurian

Blackstone’s new AI unit just made its second deal in two weeks

Blackstone manages $1.3 trillion in assets and runs more data center capacity than any other private investor. The firm recently created an AI infrastructure arm called BXN1.

Jas Khaira, who previously ran Blackstone’s CoreWeave investment, leads the unit. “Capital alone doesn’t build category-defining platforms,” Khaira said. “Google’s TPUs, a decade in the making and foundational to the AI economy, are exactly the kind of platform BXN1 was built to back.”

The Google venture is BXN1’s second deal. The first was a $1.5 billion joint venture with Anthropic, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman to sell Claude AI tools to private equity portfolio companies, as Cryptopolitan reported. One venture sells the tools. The other sells the compute the tools run on.

“We see a generational opportunity to invest capital at scale building AI infrastructure,” said Jon Gray, Blackstone’s President and COO. The firm bought QTS Realty Trust in 2021 and AirTrunk in 2024. It also holds stakes in CoreWeave, Anthropic, and OpenAI, per the Journal.

Google finally lets its chips compete outside Google Cloud

Google held back most TPU production for its own services until recently. Anthropic secured roughly one million chips through a cloud deal. Meta signed a separate agreement. Morgan Stanley projected production hitting 7 million units by 2028, with every 500,000 sold generating around $13 billion.

Spinning off a separate company lets Google pursue large infrastructure contracts without warping Google Cloud’s reported margins. CoreWeave runs this way. So does the Stargate venture behind OpenAI. Google is borrowing the model but swapping in its own silicon.

Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all indicated during recent earnings calls that AI spending would not slow. Combined capital expenditures are projected to top $700 billion in 2026, up from roughly $600 billion in earlier forecasts, per Reuters.