Blackstone's Jas Khaira to Advise 10,000 TechCrunch Disrupt Attendees on Building AI Giants
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Oct 2
Blackstone's Jas Khaira to Advise 10,000 TechCrunch Disrupt Attendees on Building AI Giants
3 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Oct 2
Summary
Jas Khaira, Blackstone N1’s global head, will speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on October 13-15 in San Francisco about how AI founders should finance rapid growth and build durable companies.
AI scaling often demands heavy spending on compute, data centers and talent, pushing founders to make major capital decisions before early momentum proves it can become a lasting business.
Blackstone’s recent AI bets show that scale: it and co-investors committed up to $600 million in equity to India’s Neysa, which also planned to raise another $600 million in debt.
Khaira’s session, “Building the Next Generation of AI Giants,” is part of 200-plus events at Disrupt, where more than 10,000 founders, investors and operators are expected to attend.
How can early-stage founders survive the crushing costs of AI compute before proving the durable economics that giant investors now demand?
With enterprise AI pilots stalling, what secret metric does Blackstone use to justify billion-dollar bets on infrastructure over software?
As investors abandon thin wrappers, will the massive pivot toward capital-intensive physical AI leave software-only startup founders completely unfunded?