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Blackstone’s Jas Khaira confirms fears over AI-buildout debt are overblown
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Private equity giant Blackstone is putting itself at the center of the AI boom, firm veteran Jas Khaira discussed last week on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Key facts
- Coreweave’s debt alone has since ballooned to about $50 billion, causing Altimeter Capital founder Brad Gerstner to note in a recent CNBC interview, “The collateral that CoreWeave is putting up
- For instance, BXN1 played a key role in several compute-related deals, among them Crux AI, a neocloud launched in partnership with Google to commercialize its custom TPUs, to which Blackstone
- Building on its success with CoreWeave, Blackstone struck other neocloud financing deals, including co-leading alongside Coatue a $10 billion credit facility for Australian GPU provider Firmus
- Beyond funding data centers, Blackstone is helping companies adopt AI through a $1.5 billion joint venture called “Ode with Anthropic,” formed alongside Anthropic and Hellman & Friedman this year
Summary
It is writing checks via various strategies, ranging from offering massive loans to data centers to investing in frontier AI models and applications. Earlier this year, the firm launched Blackstone N1 (BXN1), a San Francisco-based central hub for its AI initiatives. Unlike earlier tech cycles such as mobile or SaaS, which allowed companies to reach significant scale with moderate capital, the transition to AI requires staggering amounts of investment. Khaira emphasized that Blackstone sets itself apart from traditional venture capitalists through its focus on compute financing and its ability to offer flexible capital structures, ranging from debt to equity.