WSJ: Google and Blackstone to Form New AI Cloud Company

(CNA, New York, May 18, Comprehensive Foreign Report) The Wall Street Journal reported today, citing sources familiar with the matter, that U.S. tech giant Alphabet's subsidiary Google and Blackstone Group plan to form a joint venture artificial intelligence (AI) cloud company using Google's specialized chips. According to the report, Blackstone Group, the world's largest alternative asset manager, is expected to invest $5 billion in equity and hold a majority stake in the yet-to-be-named U.S. startup. The partnership is expected to be announced later today. Sources revealed that Google will provide the new company with software, services, and hardware, including its specialized chips known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). Google's senior executive, Benjamin Treynor Sloss, will become the CEO of the new company. The report states this is Google's largest attempt to date to commercialize and sell its self-developed chips externally. This move will intensify the competition between Google and NVIDIA, the dominant player in the AI computing market. The collaboration between Google and Blackstone comes as the demand for computing power to train and run advanced AI models reaches unprecedented levels. Currently, most large AI companies rely, at least in part, on the computing infrastructure of the U.S. company CoreWeave, which uses NVIDIA chips. In response to strong market demand, a group of smaller so-called "neocloud" companies has also emerged.