Private Markets in the Age of AI: How Blackstone Is Investing for the Next Era

Christine Anderson: Hello, everyone. For all of you, Jas is a 22-year Blackstone veteran. He's an extraordinary visionary investor, and I have to add, known for being one of the most collaborative, innovative, humble guys around these halls. So always nice to get a chance to talk to you. Thank you for making time out of your busy day. First, let's start with laying out the backdrop. A resilient economy, a reopening exit environment, wave of opportunity created by AI. But at the end of the day, you have to take all this conviction and turn it into investment decisions, which is what you do. So you've been investing in this space long before AI was dominating headlines in critical foundational areas like AI infrastructure. So I'd be curious to ask you, sort of, what did you see early that convinced you that this was really going to matter?

Jas Khaira: We were studying what every industrial shift and revolution looks like, from electricity to the automobile and to the internet. And candidly, each one starts at the physical layer, which is why almost a decade ago, Blackstone started looking at opportunities in the data center part of the stack, power, and now increasingly at chips and compute. And we've built on the back of that development and watched it very closely and seen it kind of grow and develop. And what's about to come is the part that's really gonna be interesting. Because the second part of any industrial revolution is about the value that gets created on top of all of that physical infrastructure that's being built. And this is the that Blackstone really shines because you're seeing value get created from technology in healthcare, financial services. Transportation, all areas that our clients and customers touch every day. And Blackstone's scale and our breadth and our ability to see into that by nature of having 275 companies, is a real advantage as we now look forward as to what's possible.

Christine Anderson: So now we just launched this new company with Anthropic to help deploy AI across the economy, if you will. So we own a lot of companies, as you just said. It's a complicated task trying to do this. What does this new transaction say to us about sort of the next phase of AI deployment?

Jas Khaira: That is a great word. I'm so glad you used it. Deployment is the operative word here. As we think about how technology diffuses through the economy, we talk about things happening on an S curve. And early on as they move up, technologies run into the challenges that are very human, being able to understand how to work them on key workflows, looking at security, change management, things like that. And as we've seen in our own portfolio, You need real talent. Critical engineering talent that is able to deploy that technology. Anthropic is one of the very best companies in an enterprise model framework. And being able to partner with them and their engineers to identify how to deploy AI into the real economy is one the key areas we see as growth markets. What is difficult and challenging is finding the right teams and the talent to do that. And so being able partner and build this company at the ground up gives us an edge and advantage. Having our portfolio and seeing the visibility of demand is another advantage. And then the final piece is working with Anthropic to attract the very best talent we think is going to make this a very successful company and give our investors a really unique chance to see the impact of AI in the real economy.

Christine Anderson: So, and then you were recently appointed the global head of N1, among your other responsibilities here at the firm. So just for everyone out there, N1 is our new unified platform for growth, hybrid, and perpetual private equity investing across the AI ecosystem. So be curious what this new unified platform allows us to do around sourcing, insight, and pattern recognition that's a little bit different from the way we did it before.

Jas Khaira: That is really a mouthful, but unified is the key word because the honest truth is we were operating across many different businesses and seeing different opportunities in AI. In this moment, when AI shifts from being a test case in labs to being production deployed in the economy, it's incredibly important for Blackstone to be a leader in the space, just as we have in the physical layer with data centers. And so leadership developed a plan. To create one team across our growth, hybrid, and perpetual strategies located in San Francisco, where many of the companies and founders are located that are building this, and then unify that across the platform so we are seeing all of these signals. And the key in that is for us to be able to connect the dots, to be better investors, to find opportunities, you mentioned sourcing. What we're looking to do is to be able to connect the dots across our portfolio and our data center investments to truly find and identify these N of 1 companies, these end-of-one founders in the markets. And then to still, to deliver and distill that in creating insights and having unique conclusions. Christine, we win when we have a variant perception or a conclusion ahead of our competition. And using all of those Conversations, diligence, and companies to drive insights is a key part of it. And finally, pattern recognition. It is what Blackstone does so well. I've been here for 22 years. This firm has been here for over four decades, and I think one of the lasting qualities about what makes it unique is our ability to have pattern recognition across all of these, to be great investors and manage risk responsibly.

Christine Anderson: We also launched a big new joint venture with Google. So I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit more of that, go back, go a little deeper into that transaction.

Jas Khaira: This one I'm really excited about and, interestingly, I think it also meets the market at a specific moment when the key shortage is compute. There's a company out there. It has built one of the most amazing semiconductor businesses ever, NVIDIA. And they have built this in a way where they have an 80% market share and 75% plus gross margins. And if history tells us one thing, that kind of dominance almost demands another competitor. Very few industries are sole sourced. And the chip set that is most capable of being that second to NVIDIA is Google. Google, inside their labs, have been using their own chips called TPUs for the last 15 years.

Christine Anderson: What does TPU stand for?

Jas Khaira: Tensor processing units, production grade silicon from their labs that they had been refining. They're on their eighth version now and they've never sold this to the world. They've never commercialized it. In the last year, they made a strategic decision to bring these chips to the market but they needed a partner because to do that, you need data centers, you need access to power, you need operating expertise and you need scale. And we spent the last year working with them, and they chose Blackstone to help develop a partnership to create a cloud based on these tensor processing units, these TPUs. And so I'm incredibly excited. We just launched this joint venture together. And then we're meeting the market right now. At the exact moment, we go from training these large language models to inference. Inference will be the big revenue unlock. And you have companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta seeing huge demand for their tokens. And those tokens are served from our chips. And so we're looking to scale this business. We're incredibly excited. And it's also an example of what's still to come. As we think about Blackstone N1 and we think about our efforts in AI. The chance to build a category defining company in the exact moment when the market needs it and to do it at cost with one of the most important technology companies in the world, that is an end of one investment and that is what we were built to do.

Christine Anderson: It's amazing. Well, there's so much more I think we can learn from you. I hope you'll come back. But thank you so much for that. And a great look at how Blackstone's leaning into AI, not just backing technology, but building businesses and investing around it. So thank you much for talking about the AI, the entire AI value chain and how you're taking your many, many years of experiencing and applying it to that. So thank you.

Notes: Recorded on June 3, 2026.

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