Blackstone’s Jas Khaira says fears over AI-buildout debt are overblown

Blackstone is leaning hard into the AI buildout, and Jas Khaira says the firm can finance it in ways venture capital can’t. On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, he said the firm is backing everything from data-center loans to frontier models and applications, with its AI effort now organized under Blackstone N1, a San Francisco hub launched earlier this year.

The pitch is simple enough: AI needs huge amounts of capital, and Blackstone has the balance sheet and the credit tools to provide it. The firm has $1.3 trillion in assets under management, and Khaira says that gives it room to offer flexible structures, from debt to equity. He also said Blackstone has become the largest owner of compute outside the hyperscalers, through investments in neoclouds, data centers and other compute assets.

That strategy got its first big test in 2023 with CoreWeave, not long after ChatGPT jolted demand for AI infrastructure. CoreWeave, then at “30 million of revenue and minimal profitability,” came asking for a $2.3 billion loan. Blackstone was willing because the company had Nvidia GPUs on hand and blue-chip customers like Microsoft in contract. That deal became a template for later debt financing across the neocloud world, where lenders now look closely at customer quality and the collateral behind the hardware.

And the sums have kept growing. Blackstone helped finance Crux AI, a neocloud working with Google on custom TPUs, and committed $5 billion there as an investor. It also backed Etched, a chip startup, and co-led a $10 billion credit facility for Australian GPU provider Firmus with Coatue earlier this year. Khaira said Blackstone is also behind a $1.5 billion joint venture called Ode with Anthropic and Hellman & Friedman, aimed at helping companies actually use AI, starting with Blackstone’s 280 portfolio companies.

But the debt side is getting louder scrutiny. CoreWeave’s debt has swollen to about $50 billion, and recent weeks have brought rising rates, higher credit spreads and a wobble in markets that was visible in CoreWeave’s more than 20% share drop and Firmus scrapping its planned IPO. Khaira’s answer is that this is not 2008: the financing is tied to infrastructure serving some of the most creditworthy companies in the world, even if the market is now asking a harsher question about price.