By Isla Binnie and Arasu Kannagi Basil
NEW YORK, July 23 (Reuters) – 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% 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, completing 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 1.1% in premarket trading. The stock has slipped 20% this year through the last close, in line with most of its peers. Evercore analysts said one measure of fees earned came in “a drop below expectations” but added that “focus could soon shift to the coming ramp in (management) fees as deployment picks up and all that fundraising starts to turn on”.
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% from flat in the first quarter, but remained below 2.2% 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.
(Reporting by Isla Binnie in New York and Arasu Kannagi Basil in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)
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