TNB Tech Minute: Google and Blackstone Plan New AI Cloud Company

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_02] Many companies are struggling to scale their AI deployments or even move them past the pilot stage. Often the problem isn't technology, but organizational misalignment around goals, processes and incentives. At the break, join Caroline Roach, senior partner IBM Consulting to learn why.

[00:00:16] [SPEAKER_00] Here's your morning TNB Tech Minute for Tuesday, May 19th. I'm Danny Lewis for The Wall Street Journal. We exclusively report that Google and Blackstone plan to create a new artificial intelligence cloud company

[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_00] rivaling the likes of CoreWeave. The two companies say they expect to launch the unnamed company with $5 billion in equity capital from Blackstone. The venture aims to bring 500 megawatts of capacity online in 2027, about the same amount of electric power required to serve a mid-sized city and substantially increase capacity over time.

[00:00:49] [SPEAKER_00] The new company is Google's biggest attempt yet to sell and monetize its own specialized chips to external parties, sharpening its competition with AI computing market leader, NVIDIA. Electric vehicle owners could soon face an annual nationwide registration fee to chip in for road repairs. That's if a proposed bill in the House of Representatives becomes law.

[00:01:10] [SPEAKER_00] The bipartisan legislation is part of a funding bill for highway infrastructure and is intended to substitute for the gas tax that contributes about $30 billion a year to maintain the interstate highway system, which EV owners don't pay. The bill proposes charging an annual fee to EV owners that would rise every two years until it hits $150. Owners of plug-in hybrid cars would pay a maximum of $50.

[00:01:34] [SPEAKER_00] But some environmental and EV industry groups say the proposed fee is an unfair premium and would mean electric vehicle drivers could end up paying more than those driving traditional vehicles. And in another WSJ exclusive, we report that Anthropic recently began letting users of its powerful Mythos AI model share cybersecurity threats with others who may face similar vulnerabilities.

[00:01:57] [SPEAKER_00] The new policy is a change from its previous stance amid concerns that limiting access to the information could hurt smaller companies that don't have direct access to the AI model, which is capable of finding software vulnerabilities more efficiently than humans. An Anthropic spokeswoman said that last week, the firm began telling the 50 or so large companies and organizations that have access to Mythos that they can share information about cyber threats with other entities as long as it was done responsibly.

[00:02:24] [SPEAKER_00] That's your TNB Tech Minute. Join us again this afternoon for more.

[00:02:28] [SPEAKER_02] Scaling AI successfully requires more than the right technology. Here again is Caroline Roach, senior partner, IBM Consulting.

[00:02:35] [SPEAKER_01] The biggest thing that we were talking about a year ago is what model to use. And the biggest thing that I'm talking about with my clients now is how do I drive change within my organization?

[00:02:46] [SPEAKER_02] Companies able to identify, correct, and then avoid misalignment will be best positioned to deliver meaningful business value from AI.

[00:02:53] [SPEAKER_01] The organizations that are the most successful set very clear targets and have several priorities that are very clear across the enterprise. The technology is really good, but if you're not changing your organizational alignment, not incentivizing your people correctly, not looking at workflows, you're not going to see real value with it.

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_02] Visit ibm.com slash think slash leadership to learn how building organizational alignment can help deliver AI deployments that scale and drive growth.

[00:03:22] [SPEAKER_01] This content was created by custom content from WSJ, a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department.