Blackstone, best known as a massive asset manager with real estate, private equity and infrastructure holdings, is doubling down on the AI-fueled data center buildout and the energy that'll be needed to power those workloads.
On Blackstone's third quarter earnings conference call, the company said its data center portfolio now has $70 billion in facilities and more than $100 billion in pipeline development.
Those gaudy numbers come courtesy of the $16 billion purchase of AirTrunk, the largest data center operator in Asia Pacific.
Before the AirTrunk purchase Blackstone's data center portfolio was $55 billion with $70 billion in prospective pipeline development.
Steve Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, said:
“Blackstone is the largest data center provider in the world with holdings across the U.S., Europe, India, and Japan. Last month, we announced another major expansion by agreeing to acquire AirTrunk. We were uniquely positioned to execute on this investment, given our expertise in this sector, the scale of our capital, the global integration of our teams, and our connectivity to the world's largest data center customers.
Our ability to serve these customers represents a powerful illustration of how Blackstone has become a trusted solutions provider on a massive global scale to many of the largest and most valuable companies in the world."
Blackstone is doing what it does best. Follow the money. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says repeatedly, more than $1 trillion will be spent on building new data centers for AI workloads. Blackstone also has invested in QTS, Coreweave and Digital Realty.
In addition, Blackstone is investing in power and utility companies that'll supply power to the data centers in its portfolio.
Blackstone's data center buildout took about three years. In the third quarter, Blackstone said its data center business "was again the single largest driver appreciation in our infrastructure real estate businesses."
Here's a look at the race to build out AI factories and energy to power them:
- DigitalOcean highlights the rise of boutique AI cloud providers
- Equinix, Digital Realty: AI workloads to pick up cloud baton amid data center boom
- The generative AI buildout, overcapacity and what history tells us
- AI infrastructure is the new innovation hotbed with smartphone-like release cadence
- Amazon invests in X-Energy Reactor, fuels small modular nuclear reactor run
- Google plans to use Kairos Power small modular reactors for data centers
- Generative AI driving interest in nuclear power for data centers
- Constellation Energy, Microsoft ink nuclear power pact for AI data center
