Blackstone bets big on AI under President and COO Jon Gray

Blackstone has decided artificial intelligence is not a sector. It is the whole map. Under President and COO Jon Gray, the world’s largest alternative asset manager is weaving AI into real estate, infrastructure, private equity and credit at once. Bloomberg has called it a “once-in-a-century bet”. The scale of the wager Blackstone is forecast to sign leases for six gigawatts of data center capacity in 2026. That capacity could translate to around $100 billion in potential spending. Hyperscalers, the giant cloud operators that rent out computing power, are expected to invest roughly $200 billion in chips tied to that capacity. Stack the two together and the combined economic impact could reach $300 billion in a single year. Blackstone has committed $5 billion in equity to a new AI infrastructure company built in partnership with Google. That venture will run on Google’s Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which are custom chips designed specifically for AI workloads. The target is 500 megawatts operational by 2027. Blackstone is also a participant in Nvidia’s third-party financing initiative, valued at $500 billion. Why the returns are already showing up Nine of Blackstone’s ten top-p...