Google, Blackstone's Crux AI Hires Away Meta's Data Center Chief

The Google and Blackstone-backed TPU neocloud venture has a name, Crux AI, and a construction chief pulled straight from Meta’s hyperscale build-out. The joint venture hired Alan Duong, who spent more than 12 years at Meta and most recently ran its data center engineering and construction organization, as chief development officer.

Why it matters

Blackstone is not just bankrolling a new AI compute platform, it is buying the person who built Meta’s campuses to run delivery for it. Duong was instrumental in Meta’s pivot to AI-scale data centers, and at Crux he is now responsible for end-to-end delivery of multiple gigawatts of capacity over the next several years. For developers, contractors and power brokers chasing hyperscale work, that hire is the signal: a well-capitalized new platform is about to go looking for sites, land and construction capacity at a pace set by someone who has already done it once at Meta’s scale.

The numbers

Blackstone committed $5 billion in initial equity capital to the venture, with total financing potentially reaching $25 billion once leveraged debt is included, according to Data Center Knowledge. Google supplies the Tensor Processing Units, software and technical expertise; Crux AI sells the combined capacity as a compute-as-a-service offering. The venture is targeting 500 megawatts of capacity online by 2027 and says it plans to scale to 2 gigawatts. Neither company has disclosed where the facilities will be located or how the platform will source power, according to Data Center Knowledge.

What’s next

Crux AI is led by CEO Benjamin Treynor Sloss, a longtime Google infrastructure executive, with Duong now running development under him. Site selection and power sourcing are the two variables still undisclosed, and both will determine which markets see the construction demand first. Until locations surface, developers and contractors in power-friendly Sun Belt and interconnection-ready markets are the most likely early beneficiaries, consistent with where hyperscale siting has concentrated this cycle. Track the broader buildout on our data centers topic hub.