Blackstone is working on placing roughly $23bn in debt with a group of banks to finance a portfolio of chips as part of its AI infrastructure joint venture with Google known as Crux AI, sources told 9fin.
The facility will likely be a bridge loan as banks could ultimately syndicate all or part of the debt at a later date — possibly to investment grade-focused investors, sources said.
Blackstone and Google announced the JV formerly known as Project Braid on 18 May 2026 as “a new US-based company that will offer efficient data center capacity, operations, networking, and Google Cloud's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) as a compute-as-a-service offering.” In effect, the neocloud is looking to rent out Google’s AI chips to customers.
Blackstone put an initial $5bn of equity into the venture, which aims to bring 500 MW of computing capacity online in 2027, with expectations for future growth beyond that.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that certain data center sites that were slated to use Google’s chips have been facing ramp-up delays. However, sources said that would not likely impact the debt financing as the financed chips can be repurposed at various locations.
In the race to build out AI infrastructure in the US, large chip-backed financings are making their way to the debt market.
For example, Apollo priced in June a $35bn bond package in the private credit market that is backed by Broadcom’s balance sheet and is financing an expansion of Anthropic's compute capacity. A large chunk of that debt was also sold to Blackstone.
Blackstone declined to comment. Google did not respond to requests for comment.
