Blackstone is reorganizing its growth-investing business around artificial intelligence. The world's largest alternative asset manager said on Wednesday that it has formed a new unit, Blackstone N1, to oversee its AI and high-growth technology portfolio — including the firm's stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic — under a single team based on the West Coast.
The move, reported by Bloomberg, was communicated to employees in an internal memo from co-founder and CEO Steve Schwarzman and President Jon Gray. According to the memo, the firm's leaders concluded that "AI is reshaping every business at the firm" and that "a dedicated team is needed at the center of this area to strengthen the firm's presence on the West Coast, where innovative AI and technology companies are being built."
A senior dealmaker moves to San Francisco
N1 will be led by Jas Khaira, a senior managing director who already runs the Americas for Blackstone's Tactical Opportunities business and sits on its investment committee. Khaira is relocating from New York to San Francisco to take the role, while continuing his existing Tac Opps responsibilities.
Khaira inherits the team from Jon Korngold, the longtime head of Blackstone Growth, who is leaving the firm. The new structure folds the growth business into N1 and combines it with AI and technology investments held inside Tactical Opportunities and BXPE, Blackstone's private equity vehicle aimed at wealthy individual investors.
Concentrating the AI book
Blackstone has been one of the most active large-scale backers of the current AI cycle, with exposure that spans both software and infrastructure. Beyond minority positions in OpenAI and Anthropic, the firm has built up sizable holdings in data centers and AI hardware suppliers, and in January 2025 invested $300 million in storage and data-intelligence company DDN at a $5 billion valuation.
Until now, those bets sat across separate strategies — growth equity, Tac Opps and BXPE — each with its own deal teams and investment committees. By collapsing them into N1, Blackstone is doing what its public-market peers have been pushed toward by clients: presenting a single, coherent AI franchise rather than a patchwork of overlapping mandates.
What it signals about private markets
The creation of N1 is a structural acknowledgment that AI is no longer a vertical inside private markets — it is the dominant theme. Anthropic is now valued at $350 billion following Google's $40 billion commitment last week, and OpenAI is reportedly preparing for an IPO at a valuation north of $850 billion. For an alternatives manager whose limited partners are increasingly asking how much AI exposure they have and through which fund, a unified West Coast team makes that question easier to answer.
It also extends a quieter trend: capital allocators are physically following the AI industry. Anthropic and OpenAI have been on a London office-leasing spree, Bezos's Project Prometheus is reportedly in talks for a King's Cross office of its own, and now Blackstone is concentrating senior leadership in San Francisco. The biggest checks in AI are increasingly being written from the same zip codes as the companies receiving them.
