Blackstone Q2 profit climbs 26% on AI bets, AUM hit $1.35 trillion

Blackstone saw higher earnings than were expected on Wall Street in the second quarter, as gains from its AI holdings and record client inflows lifted the company’s assets under management to about $1.35 trillion.

Blackstone says nine of its ten best-appreciating positions are tied to AI.

Quarterly earnings beat consensus by wide margin

The firm’s distributable earnings reached $1.52 a share, up from $1.21 in Q2 2025. Analysts polled by LSEG had penciled in $1.35, so the actual figures cleared consensus comfortably.

Total revenue increased by 36% to $5.04 billion, while fee-related earnings at $1.43 a share equaled $1.78 billion.

The firm’s infrastructural investments arm had gross returns of 7.2%, with positive asset sales after a slow start to the year. Blackstone sold a partial stake in three data centers to Digital Realty, and handed control of power-infrastructure company Sabre Industries to TPG. These deals increased total monetization proceeds to $31.8 billion.

AI at the centre of Blackstone portfolio

Blackstone Chief Executive Stephen Schwarzman said the quarter validated the firm’s earlier AI bets. The company has “decided to lean into the artificial intelligence megatrend,” he said, adding that becoming “a trusted partner at scale to many of the key innovators” had left the firm well positioned.

Its holdings include a stake in Anthropic, the maker of Claude, plus a data center business positioned as a core profit engine. Blackstone took the data center platform QTS private in a $10 billion deal in 2021, and the platform has appreciated sharply as demand for computing capacity has increased in recent months.

Private equity positions in SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI added to the gains, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The firm also continues to write large checks for AI, with its credit and insurance unit joining a $35 billion financing platform built alongside Broadcom and Apollo Global Management to fund AI infrastructure for frontier labs, including Anthropic. In a separate arrangement, Blackstone and Google announced that they would form an AI cloud company running on Google’s chips, with Blackstone committing $5 billion in equity.

Retail money sees reduction

New retail money into BCRED, the flagship private credit fund for individual investors, dropped to $1 billion from $1.9 billion in Q1 and $3.7 billion a year earlier. The fund’s net returns recovered to 0.4% after an unexciting first quarter, still short of the 2.2% it delivered a year ago. The BCRED fund holds $79 billion in total.

Blackstone Private Equity Strategies saw $2.4 billion, the BXINFRA infrastructure fund took in $861 million, and the BREIT real estate trust collected $1.2 billion.

In an interesting turn of events, Blackstone shares slipped in early trading, coming back from an initial premarket burst to dip 1.1% before the Thursday open.