- Blackstone’s data center investments, counting debt and projects under construction, reached $200B as of July, up from $55B in June 2024, and now sit beside a cloud venture with Google.
- The firm also finances chips and power, holds stakes in AI labs, leases offices to Anthropic and has launched a data center REIT, while a model now weighs in on proposed deals.
- Backlash against power-hungry data centers, leadership changes and fears of a capex bust show the risk of concentrating so heavily in one theme.
Blackstone is leaning into AI harder than almost any peer, and a data center empire worth $200 billion sits at the center, Bloomberg reported. President Jon Gray told Bloomberg the firm’s AI investments are its most important undertaking.
The strategy now reaches from data centers into chip financing, power generation, stakes in AI labs and even screening of potential deals.
Gray has been casting the shift as a historic one. In an interview with Bloomberg, he compared today to the move from candles and horses in the 1880s to steel, railroads and electricity by the 1900s.
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How the Bet Grew
Bloomberg reported that Blackstone started buying data centers about ten years ago and accelerated in 2021 with a roughly $10B purchase of QTS. The land that QTS held, expected to last a decade, was used up about 18 months after closing, Gray told Bloomberg, once ChatGPT triggered a demand surge.
Blackstone then acquired AirTrunk in Asia-Pacific and pushed QTS into Europe. A 2023 multibillion-dollar GPU loan to CoreWeave, backed by a Microsoft contract, helped create the market for chip-backed financing.
Gray told Bloomberg he was skeptical at first, since the borrower was a former crypto miner, but the deal turned into a great opportunity. Khaira now argues that computing capacity is becoming an asset class in its own right.
The Scale of the Exposure
Counting debt and projects still being built, Blackstone’s data center investments reached $200B in July, compared with $55B in June 2024, per Bloomberg. For scale, its whole real estate book was last valued at $608B and infrastructure at $218B with debt.
In April the firm put Jas Khaira in charge of a new AI-focused unit, BXN1, which absorbed its underperforming growth business. Blackstone has partnered with Google on Crux AI, a cloud business using Alphabet’s own chips, and joined five other financial giants in pledging $500B to fund Nvidia customers.
AI Across the Real Estate Book
Bloomberg reported that AI now shapes many property deals, from office leases to Anthropic to a data center REIT. Blackstone has also bought stakes in Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI, mostly through BXPE, a fund that offers private equity to wealthy individuals.
Infrastructure chief Sean Klimczak told Bloomberg the firm is investing in wind, solar, batteries and gas plants to meet the load. Bloomberg cited a BloombergNEF estimate that data centers will draw about 20% of U.S. electricity by 2035, up from 5.9% now.
The Risks
Bloomberg noted that real estate gained two new leaders after Nadeem Meghji’s unexpected departure, and that community pushback against energy-hungry facilities has already stopped a few Blackstone projects. Some large investors worry that spending could swing from boom to bust.
Jeffrey Hooke of Johns Hopkins’ Carey Business School told Bloomberg that data centers’ reliance on hyperscaler contracts is unproven, and that stuffing them into retail funds could prove hard if plans go wrong. Tenants might also decline to renew should AI-service demand falter, Bloomberg added, and value assumptions could prove too rosy.
Why It Matters
A position this large makes Blackstone a bellwether for real estate capital, much as its flagship property funds once were. Molly Murphy, chief investment officer of a California pension that invests with the firm, told Bloomberg that Blackstone saw the AI infrastructure build before others did.
PwC projects global data center spending, chips included, at $31.6T through 2050, with the U.S. taking nearly half, Bloomberg reported. That scale contrasts with real estate fundraising, which totaled $81.7B, the third-lowest in a decade.
What’s Next
Watch whether lease renewals and resale values hold up as the first AI-era campuses mature. Raymond James’ Sunaina Sinha Haldea told Bloomberg that investors in Blackstone’s newer infrastructure bets must account for technology obsolescence, a point that will test the thesis.
