Google and investment giant Blackstone have announced the formation of a major joint venture aimed at building a new category of AI computing infrastructure in the United States. The partnership, announced on May 18, will create a new company offering data center capacity, networking, and Google’s proprietary Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) as a compute-as-a-service platform for enterprise customers.
Blackstone is making an initial equity commitment of $5 billion, with the total investment potentially reaching $25 billion including leverage. The venture expects to bring the first 500 megawatts of data center capacity online by 2027, with plans to scale significantly over time. The new company will be led by Benjamin Treynor Sloss, a longtime Google engineering executive who has spent 22 years at the company.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the venture is designed to meet rapidly growing demand for TPUs — custom chips built specifically for AI training and inference — and to give enterprise customers greater flexibility in how they access computing resources beyond Google’s existing cloud offerings. “Together, we’re accelerating AI transformation and providing more options for organizations to access accelerated compute capability,” Kurian said, the deal also signals Google’s ambition to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI hardware market by positioning its own TPU chips as a viable alternative for large-scale AI workloads. Enterprises spent $129 billion on cloud infrastructure services in the first quarter of 2026 alone — a $35 billion year-on-year increase — underscoring the enormous scale of the opportunity the two companies are targeting.
