Bloomberg reports Crux AI, the neocloud venture Google and Blackstone stood up this spring, is lining up a $22 billion loan from a group of ten banks to buy Google TPUs, and Reuters corroborates on its own sourcing. The facility — with Goldman Sachs, SMBC, Barclays, BNP Paribas and Bank of Nova Scotia named so far, syndicating to add more — is secured against both the chips and Crux’s customer contracts, with a separate ~$1 billion revolver alongside. Blackstone put $5 billion of equity into the venture, which targets roughly 500 megawatts of capacity online in 2027. None of the three parties has confirmed, so treat the specs as reported; debt to the same venture was reported earlier this week.
The credit markets just took over the marginal funding of the build-out, with Google’s silicon as the collateral
What happened. A ten-bank group is financing $22 billion of TPU purchases for Crux, converting processors and the contracts behind them into an asset-backed lending book. That is the same financing-order dynamic this column flagged when Anthropic took $45 billion of Nscale capacity: the binding constraint of the build-out is no longer the chip supply, it is who can borrow to buy it.
Why it matters. Two things break at once for the operator. First, this is a future rate card that is not an Nvidia rate card — a Blackstone-financed, TPU-hosted cloud at ~500MW entering 2027 supply changes who sets the price in the neocloud lane you buy from. Second, the collateral structure tells you the first anchor tenants are pre-selling years of capacity to back the loan, which is how a $22 billion debt book is priced forward: supply gets locked down before it exists. Google is using Blackstone’s balance sheet to put TPUs into general circulation the way GPUs circulate, and the GPU-versus-TPU competition just gained a warehouse-scale, debt-financed entrant.
Reported by bloomberg.com and reuters.com; detail via pulse2.com. Unconfirmed by Crux, Blackstone or Google at publish.
What I’m watching
Whether Crux’s debt-backed TPU capacity actually prices below the GPU neoclouds when the ~500MW lands, who takes the syndication and the inevitable refinancing into the bond market, and what real third-party TPU supply does to the who-pays thread from this morning. Scorecard queued for the next column, same treatment Nscale got.