Google, Blackstone launch AI infrastructure joint venture
Google LLC and Blackstone Inc. are launching a joint venture that will provide a “compute-as-a-service” platform for artificial intelligence workloads.
The companies announced the collaboration on Monday. The yet-unnamed venture is launching with $5 billion in equity funding from Blackstone, which will reportedly receive a majority stake. The investment is said to be worth $25 billion including leverage, a term that usually refers to debt financing.
The venture will be led by Benjamin Treynor Sloss, a longtime Google executive who currently serves as its chief programs officer. In that capacity, Treynor Sloss oversees many aspects of the search giant’s cloud business including its data center design efforts and network.
The new venture will reportedly use the search giant’s custom tensor processing unit, or TPU, AI chips to power its infrastructure. The processors are currently available only through Google Cloud.
