Google and Blackstone Create JV for AI Chips

Google and financial company Blackstone signed a joint venture agreement to create a US-based AI cloud company. The new entity should boost the search giant’s specialized AI chips production.

The asset management player stated it would make an initial $5 billion investment in the new company, which will offer efficient data center capacity, operations, and networking, with a commitment to bring 500MW of capacity online in 2027. This will be scaled significantly over time. Google Cloud’s Tensor Processing Units (TPU) are to power the new venture, which are custom chips purpose-built for AI, and optimised for training and interference of advanced AI models.

Blackstone explained the chips, which Google is banking on to mount a challenge to companies including Nvidia, have been developed for more than a decade and already power workloads for many of the world’s top AI laboratories, capital market firms, and companies running complex high-performance computing applications. TPUs are also used for Google’s Gemini and other AI products used globally.

Benjamin Treynor Sloss, a Google executive with more than two decades of experience in building the company’s global infrastructure and operations, was named CEO of the joint venture. Blackstone will own the majority of the venture. It has $1.3 trillion worth of assets under management, which includes heavy investment in data centers.