Blackstone's Khaira on Building AI Giants at Disrupt 2026 — SkimNews
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- Jas Khaira, global head of Blackstone N1, will speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 (October 13–15, Moscone West, San Francisco) on the Builders Stage in a session titled "Building the Next Generation of AI Giants."
- Khaira joined Blackstone in 2004 and founded Blackstone N1, the firm's platform for growth, hybrid, and perpetual private equity investing across the AI ecosystem and next-generation high-growth companies.
- Blackstone and co-investors agreed to invest up to $600 million in primary equity in Indian AI infrastructure company Neysa, which planned to raise an additional $600 million in debt financing.
- In July, Anthropic launched "Ode with Anthropic," an AI implementation company backed through a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and others.
- The session targets founders facing a specific tension: AI companies must finance not just product and customer acquisition but also compute, data centers, and other infrastructure, forcing big capital decisions while early momentum is still unproven.
- Disrupt 2026 expects more than 10,000 founders, investors, and operators, 250+ speakers, and 300+ exhibiting startups across six industry stages, with matchmaking and dealmaking built into the format.
Why it matters: For AI founders weighing their next round, this session offers a direct line into how Blackstone — one of the world's largest alternative asset managers — triages AI bets, with two recent checks (Neysa at up to $1.2B combined and the $1.5B Anthropic implementation JV) illustrating the infrastructure-scale capital that category-defining AI companies now require to compete.
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