Blackstone reported second-quarter distributable earnings of $2 billion, a 26% increase from a year earlier, as Stephen Schwarzman said the firm’s bets on AI infrastructure helped drive the results. The earnings came in above analysts’ expectations of $1.7 billion and worked out to $1.52 per share.
The numbers matter because Blackstone is one of the biggest private-market investors leaning into the AI buildout, and the firm is still finding ways to profit from it even as the stock has fallen more than 19% since the beginning of January. Schwarzman, 79, said Blackstone had been selective in the investments it made during the AI infrastructure boom and said the firm had chosen its spots by using its scale and knowledge advantage to build conviction.
That selectivity has taken shape in a series of large bets. Blackstone launched a $35 billion investment platform with Broadcom and Apollo Global Management in its credit and insurance business to help lower compute and power costs for training AI models, and in May it launched an AI cloud provider with Alphabet. Its infrastructure business within private equity grew 7.2% in the quarter and 28.6% over the past 12 months through June, a sign that the AI-related buildout is feeding directly into Blackstone’s earnings base. The firm also manages private equity funds holding stakes in SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI and CoreWeave.
But Schwarzman’s tone was not celebratory in a simple way. He said Blackstone was mindful of the potential for excessive exuberance in AI, called the change unsettling because of the uncertainty around how the technology will evolve, and said society will need to monitor developments and course correct when necessary. That caution lands at the same moment the market is flooding private capital into data centers; estimates from Goldman Sachs put nearly $200 billion of data center deals completed in private markets since early last year.
The other pressure point is closer to home. Investors asked to pull $4.4 billion from BCRED, Blackstone’s flagship private credit fund, last month, equal to 10% of shares, after the firm already capped withdrawals at 5% following full redemptions in the first quarter. At the same time, Blackstone’s net realizations in credit and insurance dropped 95% from a year earlier to $3 million, and that division’s contribution to earnings fell 6%. Schwarzman ended with a line that sounded half reassurance, half warning: “Our stock is on sale today.” For investors, the next question is not whether Blackstone sees opportunity in AI. It is how long it can keep calling the right spots if the boom keeps getting hotter.
