DeepSeek rises to prominence and drives the hot trend of investment in data centers! Blackstone insists on investing a huge amount of money in data centers.

Blackstone Inc., the world's largest alternative asset management firm, CEO Steve Schwarzman recently stated that with the continuous construction and expansion of artificial intelligence data centers by large global tech companies, as well as enterprises working to provide the necessary power resources and power expenditures for expanding data centers, Blackstone Inc. is very willing to invest more funds in AI growth-related investments in the future. Initially, the market believed that the emergence of DeepSeek's "low cost + high performance" AI large model computing power new paradigm would significantly reduce the demand for AI computing power. However, US tech giants and alternative asset management giants like Blackstone showed investors through actual actions that AI computing power demand, especially cloud-based AI inference computing power demand, will only become stronger as AI large models and AI application software penetrate various industries. They believe it is worth deploying huge capital in data centers. In recent years, Blackstone Inc., focusing on alternative assets, has actively deployed funds related to AI globally, mainly used for deploying investments in the efficient operation of generative AI applications such as ChatGPT and the critical infrastructure of large data centers. For example, in September last year, Blackstone made the largest investment ever in the Asia-Pacific region by acquiring data center operator AirTrunk, valuing AirTrunk at approximately 24 billion Australian dollars (about 14.9 billion US dollars). "We are fully willing to invest more funds to accelerate the growth of AirTrunk," Schwarzman said at the Australian Financial Review Business Summit in Sydney held on Tuesday local time via video link. "We also have some businesses in areas where AirTrunk has not yet ventured. If we combine them, it will be great." Not long ago, Blackstone Inc. acquired QTS Realty Trust, which owns dozens of data centers in the US, for as much as 10 billion US dollars. On Tuesday, Schwarzman described the deal as "a once-in-a-lifetime deal" and stated that the expansion of the data center business is still accelerating. "The power of this technology will be very significant and extraordinary," added the CEO of Blackstone. In September last year, Blackstone Inc. confirmed an investment of up to 10 billion pounds to build an artificial intelligence data center in northeastern England. With the successive emergence of consumer-centric generative AI tools like DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Grok, it may drive an era of AI prosperity lasting more than a decade, and this alternative asset management giant strives to tightly grasp the huge profits brought by AI core infrastructure - data centers in the AI era. As the world's largest alternative asset management firm, Blackstone currently manages approximately 1.1 trillion US dollars in assets. After becoming the largest commercial real estate manager through its acquisition funds, Blackstone has in recent years followed the global trend of corporate AI deployment as it bets on data centers and artificial intelligence technology. At the same time, its credit business department has begun to replace some banks as corporate lenders and introduced new services for retail investors. Schwarzman also stated that a recent survey of the latest quarter from Blackstone's 250 companies showed that the US economy is in good condition, and none of the surveyed executives expect any degree of economic recession this year. The CEO also mentioned discussions last week with Australian pension funds in Washington and New York. With industry growth continuing its expansion to reach a size "beyond what the Australian economy can easily absorb," he said. The momentum of AI engulfing all things is coming, and the demand for AI computing power will surge rather than decrease The unprecedented global trend of deploying artificial intelligence has driven major enterprises' fervent demand for the core infrastructure of artificial intelligence - large data center entities, which is why Blackstone Inc. has continued to invest heavily in data centers in recent years. As AI applications accelerate penetration, data centers have become the most essential facilities for efficiently processing and storing large amounts of data. Undoubtedly, Blackstone sees the enormous revenue potential in this field. Global "super-scale cloud services and cloud-based AI computing power providers," such as Amazon.com, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, and Facebook's parent company Meta, have been investing huge sums in the construction or expansion of data centers to meet the booming demand for AI training/inference computing power. Regarding spending plans for 2025, Amazon.com, Inc. management expects to reach 100 billion US dollars, and Amazon.com, Inc. believes that the emergence of DeepSeek means that future inference-side AI computing power demand will significantly expand. Therefore, the company is increasing spending to support AI business development. CEO Jassy stated, "We will not make purchases without seeing significant demand signals. I think this is a good signal for the mid- to long-term development of the AWS business when Amazon.com, Inc increases its capital expenditure, especially in rare business opportunities like AI." With DeepSeek's launch of DeepSeek R1 continuing to gain global popularity, and the latest research from DeepSeek showing that NSA mechanisms achieve revolutionary training and inference efficiency improvements in AI large models at the transformer level, it has triggered global AI large model developers to follow this "ultra-low cost AI large model computing power paradigm" and comprehensively drive AI application software (especially generative AI software and AI agents) to accelerate penetration into various industries worldwide, completely revolutionizing the efficiency of various business scenarios and significantly increasing sales.Sales, AI computing power demand in the future may show exponential growth instead of the "DeepSeek shock wave" that market previously expected, triggering a sharp decline in computing power demand.Microsoft Corporation CEO Nadella mentioned the "Jevons Paradox" - when technological innovation significantly increases efficiency, resource consumption not only does not decrease, but instead increases dramatically. This phenomenon is also transplanted into the field of artificial intelligence computing power, as the trend of the large-scale application of AI models will bring unprecedented demand for AI reasoning computation. For example, after DeepSeek was integrated into WeChat, it was often seen that DeepSeek's deep thinking could not respond to customer needs, verifying that the current AI computing power infrastructure construction in the Chinese market is far from meeting the demand for AI computing power. As NVIDIA Corporation CEO Jensen Huang stated in the latest NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) earnings conference call, the demand for AI computing power based on AI chips continues to be strong: "DeepSeek-R1 has ignited global enthusiasm, and the company is excited about the potential demand brought by AI reasoning. This is an excellent innovation, but more importantly, it has opened up a world-class reasoning AI model. Models such as OpenAI, Grok-3, DeepSeek-R1, etc. are reasoning models that scale inference time. Inference models can consume more than 100 times the computation power."