Blackstone CEO rejects AI data center ‘bubble’ narrative

Schwarzman’s comments from the Gulf are a useful counterweight to market jitters about an ‘AI bubble’. When one of the world’s largest alternative asset managers says AI data centers are “conservative businesses” built on long leases with blue‑chip tenants, it underscores how central this infra has become to institutional portfolios. For the AGI race, the important point is that big private capital isn’t treating AI compute as a fad; it’s treating it as durable infrastructure like toll roads or cell towers.

That mindset matters because it determines how resilient the build‑out will be if there’s a tech correction. If infra funds and sovereign wealth vehicles continue to view AI campuses as 20‑year contracted cashflows underpinned by firms like NVIDIA and hyperscalers, we’re less likely to see a hard stop in compute availability. Instead, we’ll see gradual repricing and maybe some deal restructurings. From an ecosystem perspective, that means continued capacity for model training and agents, even if equity valuations wobble. The real risk shifts from “does the money dry up?” to “can the grid, land-use policy, and talent pipeline keep up?”