Smart people react to Google and Blackstone teaming up on an AI company
Smart people react to Google and Blackstone teaming up on an AI company
Shubhangi GoelTue, May 19, 2026 at 5:40 AM UTC
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Google and Blackstone are working on a new AI company.Matthias Balk/picture alliance via Getty Images and Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images -
Google and Blackstone announced a new AI company to challenge CoreWeave and Nebius.
The new AI company will leverage Google's TPUs to offer enhanced compute options for businesses.
Here's what smart people are saying about the new deal.
Google and Blackstone are launching a new AI company that would rival cloud providers like CoreWeave and Nebius.
Blackstone, the world's biggest asset manager, will invest $5 billion in the new US-based company at the start, the firms said Monday. The company plans to offer data center capacity, operations, and Google Cloud's Tensor Processing Units as a service.
Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, said in the statement that the new company gives organizations more options to access compute.
"This joint venture with Blackstone helps meet growing demand for TPUs, which are optimized specifically for efficiency and performance in the AI era," Kurian said.
Here's how tech analysts and investors reacted to the news:
Rittenhouse Research
In an X post, Rittenhouse Research, a market research and investment analysis firm, noted that most major neocloud providers — including CoreWeave, Nebius, Crusoe, and Lambda — have largely aligned themselves with Nvidia hardware, creating an opening for Google-backed TPU alternatives.
The firm added that while the move could increase competition for those companies, it's ultimately a strong endorsement of the neocloud model that those firms helped establish.
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Gilles Drieu, former director of engineering at Google
Gilles Drieu, the chief technology officer at ADT and a former engineering leader at Google, said Google and Blackstone's new TPU-based AI cloud reflects several major shifts underway in the AI infrastructure market.
In an X post, he said that hyperscalers are beginning to commercialize their proprietary chips outside their own cloud platforms. Meanwhile, private capital is increasingly funding large-scale AI infrastructure projects once financed directly by Big Tech companies.
Drieu also said the AI stack is becoming more vertically integrated, spanning chips, inference, and energy infrastructure.
"Compute is starting to behave like a strategic supply chain," he wrote on X.
Jason Kotik, portfolio manager at Rockefeller Global Investment Management
"'Welcome to Hell' is the perfect way to put it," wrote Kotik, an equities portfolio manager at Rockefeller Global.
"Google and Blackstone joining forces means every other AI company just got put on notice," Kotik said on X. "The big players are consolidating power fast, and the small fry are getting squeezed out."
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Source: “AOL Money”
