Google, Blackstone join hands to form AI cloud company

San Jose (California) [US], May 19 : Global tech giant Google and private equity major Blackstone have joined hands to form a new AI cloud company that will take on the likes of CoreWeave with Google's specialised chips, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The attempt is the biggest so far by Google to market its specialised chips and take on the likes of CoreWeave, which uses Nvidia chips for computing infrastructure.

Blackstone will infuse an equity capital worth $5 billion in the AI cloud venture and is likely to be a majority owner, the WSJ report added.

The new AI venture is being seen as Google's biggest attempt so far to market its specialised chips called Tensor Processing Units or TPUs. Most of the AI companies use CoreWeave's computing infrastructure that uses chips from Nvidia.

The new company plans to bring 500 megawatts of capacity online by 2027.

The AI chip market is one of the hottest markets and Blackstone, which counts itself as a major AI investor, sees an opportunity to further scale its presence. It is already a major investor in CoreWeave, OpenAI and Anthropic.

The move comes at a critical moment when AI models are fast gaining traction among big corporate clients and the demand for computing power to run them is rapidly increasing.

Blackstone has been ramping up its AI investments with big billion-dollar bets. Its chairman, Stephen Schwarzman, recently said in an earnings call that the global private equity giant has $150 billion in data centre assets.

Earlier, on April 29 Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the results for the company saying, "It was a terrific quarter for Alphabet. Our momentum was on full display at Cloud Next last week, and the month of May brings even more with I/O, Brandcast and Google Marketing Live. It's clear that our AI investments and full-stack approach are driving performance across our business."

According to Pichai, Search & Other Advertising, revenue grew 19%. Cloud accelerated due to strong demand for AI products and infrastructure. Revenue grew 63%, exceeding $20 billion for the first time, and backlog nearly doubled quarter-on-quarter to over $460 billion.

Pichai said, Gemini Enterprise is seeing tremendous momentum, with 40% growth quarter-over-quarter in paid monthly active users. In subscriptions, this reported as the strongest quarter ever for consumer AI plans, primarily driven by adoption of the Gemini app.

Pichai said that the number of paid subscriptions has now reached 350 million, with YouTube and Google One being the key drivers.

Pichai also said that the company's AI models have great momentum. First-party models now process more than 16 billion tokens per minute via direct API use by our customers, up from 10 billion last quarter.

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