Blackstone says AI demand remains massive despite growing bubble concerns.

Blackstone (NYSE: BX) President Jon Gray is pushing back against mounting fears that artificial intelligence investment is becoming a bubble, arguing that demand is already running far ahead of supply.

Gray said the current AI buildout looks very different from past bubbles because companies are not building infrastructure first and simply hoping customers eventually arrive.

"When you think about a bubble, you think about building capacity and then hoping the demand comes," Gray said in an interview with Bloomberg. "With AI, you're building capacity, and you're hoping you can keep up with the demand."

Gray said spending on AI models across Blackstone portfolio companies has increased about 20-fold year over year.

He also pointed to Ode, an AI deployment company created by Blackstone and Anthropic, saying the business is struggling to keep up with customer demand. "Demand is almost parabolic," Gray said.

The bigger constraint, in Blackstone's view, remains supply. Gray highlighted bottlenecks around power, chips, permitting and capital, which are making it difficult to bring new compute capacity online quickly enough. Blackstone has focused heavily on that infrastructure layer, including data centers and energy assets contracted to major technology companies.

His comments come as the AI bubble debate intensifies. Citadel founder Ken Griffin recently argued that investors are almost certainly in an AI bubble, while global credit markets have also shown growing unease over the amount of debt being used to fund AI infrastructure.