Google and Blackstone plan to launch an AI cloud company
What's the story
Tech giant Google and investment firm Blackstone are teaming up to launch a new artificial intelligence (AI) cloud company. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the venture will be backed by a $5 billion equity investment from Blackstone, which will take a majority stake in the unnamed US-based company.
Partnership
New venture to utilize Google's specialized chips
The new company will leverage Google's specialized chips, hardware, software, and services. These include Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), a type of chip specifically designed for machine learning tasks. The move is seen as a major step by Google to monetize its own chips with external customers and intensify competition with NVIDIA, the current leader in AI computing.
Leadership and expansion
The project aims to go online by 2027
Benjamin Treynor Sloss, a long-time Google executive, is set to be the CEO of this new company. The venture intends to bring 500MW of capacity online by 2027, which is roughly the amount of electric power needed to serve a midsize city. It also plans to increase its capacity significantly over time as demand for computing power for advanced AI models continues to grow.
Strategic moves
Blackstone's investment in AI
Blackstone is one of the most active investors in AI on Wall Street. The firm has over $150 billion in data center assets, including sites under construction, and an extra $160 billion in potential new projects. It has also made big investments in CoreWeave, Anthropic, and OpenAI among other AI-related companies.