Blackstone beats profit estimates on AI gains as assets hit $1.35 trillion
FILE PHOTO: A logo of Blackstone is pictured in Manhattan, New York City, U.S. July 29, 2025. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
Read a summary of this article on FAST.
Get bite-sized news via a new
cards interface. Give it a try.
Click here to return to FAST
Tap here to return to FAST
FAST
July 23 : Blackstone’s second-quarter income rose to beat market expectations on Thursday, as the world’s largest alternative asset manager benefited from growing assets under management and reaping profits from a mammoth bet on artificial intelligence.
The New York-based company said inflows in the quarter pushed total assets to $1.35 trillion. Distributable earnings, or profit available to shareholders, rose 26 per cent on a per-share basis to $1.52, beating estimates of $1.35, according to LSEG data.
Deals to sell a stake in three data centers to Digital Realty and a majority holding in power infrastructure company Sabre Industries to TPG helped push its haul from monetizing assets to $31.8 billion.
Market volatility had hampered some deals in the first quarter, but Blackstone picked up the pace in the second.
Guess Word
Crack the word, one row at a time
Buzzword
Create words using the given letters
Mini Sudoku
Tiny puzzle, mighty brain teaser
Mini Crossword
Small grid, big challenge
Word Search
Spot as many words as you can
Blackstone also benefited from the listings of advertising technology company Liftoff Mobile, a data center investment vehicle called Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust and Indian office REIT Bagmane.
Its shares fell 2.1 per cent in premarket trading. The stock has slipped 20 per cent this year through the last close.
Blackstone is betting heavily on the growth of AI and is joining peer Apollo in a $35 billion financing for custom chips to be used by Claude Code creator Anthropic.
Nine of its top 10 best-appreciating investments are linked to AI, Blackstone said. These include a stake in Anthropic and its data center businesses. Blackstone took data center platform QTS private for $10 billion in 2021.
CEO Stephen Schwarzman said the firm had decided to “lean into the artificial intelligence megatrend”. He said the company becoming “a trusted partner at scale to many of the key innovators” had positioned it well for the future.
Worries that AI will disrupt software businesses have weighed in recent months on private equity and credit firms that both invested in and lent to those companies in droves. This has contributed to scrutiny on how they value assets.
Amid the upset, wealthy individuals, whose assets represent almost a quarter of the total Blackstone manages, have sought to withdraw money from private credit funds in particular.
The retail flagship Blackstone Private Credit Fund BCRED raised $1 billion in the quarter, down from $1.9 billion in the previous quarter and $3.7 billion in the same period of 2025.
Net returns from private credit improved to 0.4 per cent from flat in the first quarter, but remained below 2.2 per cent from a year ago.
Blackstone Private Equity Strategies and infrastructure fund BXINFRA, which are also offered to wealthy individuals, raised $2.4 billion and $861 million, respectively. Real estate investment trust BREIT, which started exercising a right to block investor redemptions in 2022, pulled in $1.2 billion.
Source: Reuters
Sign up for our newsletters
Get the CNA app
Stay updated with notifications for breaking news and our best stories
Get WhatsApp alerts
Join our channel for the top reads for the day on your preferred chat app
Get bite-sized news via a new
cards interface. Give it a try.
Click here to return to FAST
Tap here to return to FAST
FAST
About The Author
