Google and Blackstone Team to Launch AI Cloud Venture

Google is working with asset manager Blackstone to launch an artificial intelligence (AI) cloud company.

The new venture is designed to provide “efficient data center capacity, operations, networking, and Google Cloud’s tensor processing units (TPUs) as a compute-as-a-service offering,” Blackstone said in its announcement Tuesday (May 18).

Customers will have the option to access cloud TPUs along with using them through Google Cloud, the announcement added.

“This joint venture with Blackstone helps meet growing demand for TPUs, which are optimized specifically for efficiency and performance in the AI era,” said Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s CEO. “Together, we’re accelerating AI transformation and providing more options for organizations to access accelerated compute capability.”

Google’s TPUs are custom chips optimized for training and inference in advanced AI models, and are used by outside customers such as AI labs and other firms. The custom chips are also used to power Google’s in-house AI offerings like Gemini.

Under the terms of this new partnership, Blackstone will commit $5 billion to start, with the new company expecting to bring the first 500 megawatts of capacity online next year.

“Google will supply hardware, including TPUs, as well as software and services to the new company so it can rapidly accelerate to meet the growing demand for accelerated computing, leveraging the benefit of Google’s technical and domain expertise,” the announcement added.

A report on the new company by the Wall Street Journal notes that industry observers have for years wondered whether Google would commercialize its TPUs for widespread usage. Google has agreements with two outside companies, that report added: one with Anthropic giving the AI startup access to about one million of its chips, and another with Meta.

In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote last week that while discussions of the technology tend to center around questions of supply, they always ignore the “harder half: demand.”

This came after Anthropic announced an small- to medium-sized business (SMB)-focused AI plugin for tools like PayPal, Intuit, Canva, and Docusign, a move that suggests AI’s next stage could depend less on how much capability technology companies can offer and more on whether ordinary companies can sustain demand inside everyday work.

“After all, the question facing the market is no longer simply whether frontier models can perform astonishing tasks,” PYMNTS wrote.

“It is whether accountants, nurses, insurance adjusters, teachers, procurement managers, financial analysts and their peers across Main Street can integrate AI into the highly specialized workflows they understand better than any Silicon Valley engineer.”