Blackstone Backs Indian AI with $1.2B Investment
Blackstone has invested $1.2 billion in Neysa to accelerate the buildout of AI infrastructure in India. The funding is designated for developing data centers and AI compute platforms. The investment highlights the increasing global demand for regional AI capacity and resilient technology supply chains beyond traditional hubs.
- Neysa was founded in 2023 by Sharad Sanghi, who previously established Netmagic, one of India's pioneering data center providers that was later acquired by NTT in 2012. - The $1.2 billion capital raise is composed of up to $600 million in equity, giving Blackstone a majority stake, and an additional $600 million in planned debt financing. - The funding is intended to dramatically scale Neysa's compute capacity from around 1,200 GPUs currently to over 20,000. - This investment is part of a broader digital infrastructure strategy for Blackstone in India, which has already committed $6 billion to data center development in the country through ventures like its subsidiary Lumina CloudInfra. - Beyond hardware, Neysa provides a full-stack AI Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), offering tools for workflow orchestration, model fine-tuning, security, and observability to manage the entire AI lifecycle. - The deal aligns with India's strategic push for "sovereign AI," as its national data center capacity is projected to more than double from 0.9 GW in 2023 to approximately 2 GW by 2026. - Other participants in the equity funding round include Teachers' Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners. - Blackstone's investment follows its global pattern of backing core AI infrastructure, which includes investments in data center operators QTS and AirTrunk, as well as GPU cloud provider CoreWeave.
