Blackstone Shrugs off Private Credit Concerns amid AI Focus

Blackstone, Wall Street’s poster child for private equity, has effectively become a $300 billion power and data infrastructure play.

Blackstone reported impressive first-quarter earnings Thursday, with net income rising 5.6% from a year earlier to $649.7 million. Distributable earnings, a key metric that represents cash generated by the business that’s available to shareholders, jumped 25% to $1.76 billion, beating analysts’ expectations. It was one of the firm’s best quarters ever for private credit institutional fundraising, and an illustration of how Blackstone is an “all-weather” firm, its president and chief operating officer, Jon Gray, told CNBC. But the key, he added, was the firm’s decision to lean into AI infrastructure. 

“That is driving the returns across so many of our vehicles,” Gray said, adding that eight of the 10 best-performing investments were in AI infrastructure-related areas like data centers and battery storage. He said the AI buildout is what “will really drive our firm going forward.” 

About Private Credit … 

Now that stocks seem to be focusing less on the war with Iran, AI companies can get back to public market listings. As a result, “this should be probably our best year ever for IPOs as a firm,’ Gray told Bloomberg. 

But the AI investing frenzy that has buoyed one part of the world’s largest alternative asset management business has been a thorn in the side for another. Concerns that AI will disrupt software companies are one of the reasons investors have been yanking money from private credit funds, including Blackstone’s BCRED, in recent months. Distributable earnings in the private credit and insurance part of the business fell 26% from the first quarter of 2025. That’s perhaps why the stock ended the trading day down nearly 6% on Thursday. 

Blackstone’s leaders don’t seem too concerned: 

• In a post-earnings call with analysts, CEO Stephen Schwarzman said the company had been “navigating an intensely negative campaign” against the private credit sector despite strong long-term returns, resilient fund structures and continued demand from institutional investors and insurance companies.
• BCRED has generated a 9.4% return since its launch in 2021. 

Cockroach, Who? JPMorgan thinks there’s an opportunity in private credit now, too. The firm is in talks with institutional investors to raise several billion dollars for a new private credit push, Bloomberg reported Thursday. (Yes, only six months after CEO Jamie Dimon quipped, “When you see one cockroach, there are probably more” about the private credit market.)