The Chinese A.I. start-up DeepSeek upended the prevailing view that artificial intelligence systems require huge amounts of power and investment. But Blackstone, the private equity behemoth and a major global investor in data centers that run A.I. systems, remains optimistic.
“We still think there’s a vital need for physical infrastructure, data centers and power,” Jonathan Gray, Blackstone’s president, said during a fourth-quarter earnings call with investors on Thursday. “The form of that use may change.”
Mr. Gray said that like much of the investing and corporate world, executives at Blackstone have spent a lot of time in the past week weighing the impact of DeepSeek.
In recent years, Blackstone has made an aggressive push into buying and building data centers, the physical infrastructure used by technology companies to run A.I. systems. In 2021, it purchased the U.S. data center firm QTS for $10 billion, and last year, it led a roughly $16 billion deal to buy AirTrunk, which operates data centers in Asia.
Mr. Gray’s comments echoed the relatively sanguine views of some technology executives in recent days, including those of Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella. Mr. Gray said he expected that as the cost of computing power for A.I. drastically decreased, A.I. would be more widely adopted. In other words, he said, while the amount of power needed for an A.I. model to answer a specific question may decrease, people will ask more questions.
Mr. Gray said Blackstone builds data centers only for technology companies that sign long-term leases. “We don’t build them speculatively.” The way customers use these data centers, he noted, could very well change.
Blackstone’s stock has been on a run lately. It’s traded up roughly 40 percent in the past year, outpacing major stock indexes. It was down roughly 3 percent in midday trading.
Thursday’s investor call was a shift from previous ones. In recent calls, the firm’s senior executives had taken a few minutes at the outset to discuss A.I.’s importance to the world and Blackstone’s investments around the technology.
In July, for example, Blackstone’s chief executive, Stephen A. Schwarzman, called the consequences of A.I. “as profound as what occurred in 1880, when Thomas Edison patented the electric lightbulb.” He cited expectations that the United States would need approximately $1 trillion of capital expenditures over the next five years for new data centers and another $1 trillion outside the United States.
“Blackstone is positioning itself to be the largest financial investor in A.I. infrastructure in the world as a result of our platform, capital and expertise,” Mr. Schwartzman said at the time.
On Thursday morning’s call, Blackstone’s executives did not address A.I. until they were asked about it.
