The investment giant is ramping up its already large AI spending — with its sights now set on Japan.
Blackstone president and CEO Jonathan Gray told Japanese media outlet Nikkei that it is setting aside $30 billion for AI data centers in the country in the next three to five years.
The company intends to develop facilities exceeding 1 gigawatt in capacity, more than double its current combined capacity of 500 megawatts.
Grey offered no specific timeline and did not name locations.
However, he tried to alleviate concerns that AI spending was excessive on infrastructure, despite the vast sums involved. “There’s a lot of concern that there’s going to be a bubble in the computer building,” he said in the interview. “I actually think the risk is there’s a shortage [of capacity].”
The move comes weeks after Blackstone said it was teaming with Google to form a new company that will try to challenge the dominance of Nvidia by providing purpose-built TPU chips, cloud services and data center capacity.
The Google agreement followed a deal with Anthropic to encourage the roll-out of Claude models directly into businesses – evidence, Gray said, of Blackstone’s desire to be involved in the entire ecosystem.
Japan is becoming an increasingly important battleground for AI infrastructure, as evidenced by SoftBank’s plan to start producing AI servers in fiscal year 2027 at a plant near Osaka, previously used by electronics company Sharp to produce LCD technology. It is currently being transformed into a data center and production hub.
In March, meanwhile, Microsoft committed to investing $10 billion in infrastructure rollout in the country, on top of the $2.9 billion it had pledged in 2024.
And the same month, GMI Cloud revealed plans for a $12 billion AI center in Kagoshima, in southern Japan, with a 1-gigawatt capacity promised by 2030.
Gray told Nikkei that he that the AI rollout would offer particular benefit to Japan’s healthcare industry, particularly in drug discovery and personalized treatment.
He also said that Blackstone is eyeing more private equity investments in Japan, particularly in robotics and advanced manufacturing.
