Simpson Thacher represented funds affiliated with Blackstone in connection with their joint venture with Google to create a new U.S.-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. Google's TPUs are custom chips purpose-built for AI, and optimized for training and inference of advanced AI models. They have been developed and deployed in production for more than a decade and power workloads for many of the world’s top AI labs, capital market firms, and companies running the most complex high-performance computing applications. TPUs also power Gemini and the AI-driven products Google delivers to billions of users globally.
Under the terms of the partnership, Blackstone is making an initial commitment of $5 billion in equity capital from funds managed by Blackstone. The company expects to bring the first 500 MW of capacity online in 2027, with plans to scale significantly over time. Google will supply hardware, including TPUs, as well as software and services to the new company so it can rapidly accelerate to meet the growing demand for accelerated computing, leveraging the benefit of Google’s technical and domain expertise.
The Simpson Thacher team was led by Anthony Vernace, Michael Chao and Katy Lukaszewski, members of the Firm’s market-leading Digital Infrastructure and Data Center group, and also included: Dan Kim, Margeaux Bergman, Eliot Murphy and Ramon Callis (M&A); Jonathan Goldstein, Sophie Staples, Ruoxi Zhang and Angela Sbano (Tax); Gregory Grogan, Scott Schilson, Hannah Daniels and Benjamin Faber (Executive Compensation and Employee Benefits); Jamie Talbot, Stanley Yu and Tally Smitas (Intellectual Property and Privacy); Jonathan Ozner (Capital Markets); and Brian Chisling and Javad Asghari (Energy and Infrastructure).