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 renting out Nvidia GPU clusters to AI developers.

Growing pains and canceled projects

By September 2026, Crux AI had already hit several speed bumps. Power availability issues, permitting delays, and construction timeline slippage plagued key data center sites. A planned project in Wyoming was canceled outright.

Why TPUs, and why now

Google’s TPUs are purpose-built silicon designed specifically for machine learning workloads. Google has used them internally for years to power everything from Search to its Gemini AI models.

For Google, the partnership solves a different problem. Bringing in Blackstone, which manages over $1 trillion in assets, gives Google a financial partner that can move fast and absorb the capital intensity of infrastructure buildouts.

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