Blackstone took a defensive stance in its latest earnings call after China's DeepSeek caused tech stocks to tumble.

After previously using the call to push the benefits of AI infrastructure, the subject was not broached until Morgan Stanley asked about DeepSeek-instigated data center buildout concerns.

The Chinese AI company's more efficient model has led many to question the rationale of building ever-larger data centers to train ever-larger models.

"We've obviously been spending a lot of time the last week looking at the impact of DeepSeek," Blackstone COO Jon Gray said.

"I'd start with our data center business, which is the largest in the world. We have $80 billion of leased data centers. The good news is that business in these are long-term leased data centers with some of the biggest companies in the world. And we do not build data centers speculatively anywhere in the world."

The company had a $70bn portfolio in October, and at the time said that it had a prospective data center pipeline of $100bn. It did not disclose its current pipeline.

Gray said that DeepSeek was part of a broader trend, where "the cost of compute is coming down pretty dramatically. But at the same time, that's going to lead to more usage to more adoption."

This could mean that "maybe there's a little less training that's done as a result of less intensity, but at the same time, there's more inference, maybe there's more cloud, maybe there's more to do with enterprise."

This means that there's still a critical need for data centers, but "the form of that use may change," he said.

Blackstone, through QTS and other investments, plans to continue to "go out and spend the big dollars to build these things," but only "based on the demand signals from our tenants."

Gray added: "We still think it's a very important segment, and there's a way to run. But obviously, we're watching what's happening very closely."