Blackstone, a New York-based asset manager, said on July 23 that second-quarter distributable earnings, or profits available to shareholders, rose 26% to US$1.97 billion.

That beat analysts’ estimate of US$1.66 billion, helped by exits and AI-related investments.

Distributable earnings reached US$1.52 a share, above the US$1.33 estimate, and Blackstone’s stock rose 2% to US$125.20 in New York morning trading.

President Jon Gray said nine of Blackstone’s 10 best-performing investments were tied to data centers, energy, power, or large language models.

He said last month’s sale of Blackstone’s stake in data center assets to Digital Realty included three fully leased Northern Virginia hyperscale data centers with 288 megawatts of information technology capacity.

Blackstone received US$3.5 billion for its stake.

Blackstone said much of its second-quarter investment went to AI-related deals, including US$5 billion of equity for a new cloud company it is setting up with Alphabet’s Google.

The firm had US$228.1 billion in dry powder, or capital available for new investments, and received US$68.3 billion in inflows, while distributable earnings at its credit and insurance arm fell 6% to US$373 million.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

Recent Blackstone developments