Blackstone is reportedly preparing to invest tens of billions of dollars to secure additional capacity for Google’s custom AI chips, a sharp increase from its initial $5 billion commitment. In May 2026, Blackstone and Alphabet announced a joint venture to create an AI compute company, with Google contributing TPU chips and cloud expertise and Blackstone providing capital and infrastructure management. The venture, initially known internally as Project Braid and later branded as Crux AI, planned to bring 500 megawatts of data-center capacity online by 2027. Blackstone’s $5 billion equity investment gave it a majority stake, while leverage was expected to lift total investment to about $25 billion. The reported new target covers additional TPU capacity across multiple gigawatts of data-center infrastructure. Crux AI would compete with providers such as CoreWeave, which rents Nvidia GPU clusters to AI developers. By September 2026, the venture faced power constraints, permitting delays and construction slippage, while a planned Wyoming project had been canceled. Google’s TPUs are specialized chips for machine-learning workloads and have powered services including Search and Gemini. The partnership also gives Google a financial partner with more than $1 trillion in assets to help fund infrastructure-intensive expansion.