The loan
A group of ten banks is providing a $22bn chip loan to Crux AI, the cloud venture backed by Blackstone and Alphabet, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on 16 September. According to Reuters, the lenders include Goldman Sachs, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, Barclays, BNP Paribas and the Bank of Nova Scotia.
Bloomberg, which first reported the deal, said the money will be used to buy Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, and that the loan is backed by the value of those chips and by Crux’s customer contracts. The banks are bringing in more lenders to share the risk, and the debt could later be replaced with long-term financing from the investment-grade bond market, according to Bloomberg’s report as summarised by Reuters.
BNP Paribas, Barclays and SMBC declined to comment. Blackstone, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs and the Bank of Nova Scotia did not immediately respond to Reuters.
What Crux is
Crux AI launched on 9 September as a US company selling dedicated AI computing capacity. Google supplies the TPUs, software and services, and funds managed by Blackstone made an initial $5bn equity commitment. Its chief executive is Benjamin Treynor Sloss, who spent more than 20 years at Google and started its site reliability engineering discipline.
The company says it plans to bring its first 500 megawatts of TPU capacity online in 2027, as the first phase of a multi-gigawatt build-out. It is aiming at AI labs, technology companies, enterprises and governments.
“AI presents a generational technological shift and, with it, the opportunity to reimagine the infrastructure powering it from the ground up,” Treynor Sloss said at the launch.
Why it matters
The structure puts the chips themselves and Crux’s customer contracts behind the debt. A loan of this size for a company that formally launched a week ago shows how much banks are prepared to lend against that model.
It also matters for Google. Crux gives the company a route to sell its TPUs as capacity outside Google Cloud. Whether Crux names its first customers, and whether the loan is sold on or refinanced as bonds, are the next things to watch.
