The neocloud set up by Google and Blackstone to offer TPU services has officially launched as Crux AI.

The company, led by former Google engineering VP Benjamin Treynor Sloss, also this week hired the VP and head of data center engineering and construction at Meta, Alan Duong.

Duong spent more than 12 years at Meta, and was instrumental in the company's aggressive pivot to AI data centers. In 2023, the company paused all of its in-development facilities, with Duong leading the team that redesigned the projects for the AI era (we profiled Duong's work at the time here).

At Crux, Duong has been named chief development officer, where he will be "responsible for end-to-end delivery of multiple GW of data center capacity over the coming years," he said.

"I spent the last 12 years at Meta building data centers, and the clearest lesson from that time is that success in this business isn't one thing done well. It's a chain that has to hold, end-to-end: originating sites with real power and real runway, showing up in host communities as a long-term neighbor rather than a transaction, designing for efficient use of power, water and materials, building safely with the trades who put the steel in the ground, and handing over facilities that operators can run for decades. Break any link and the rest doesn't save you. That end-to-end view is what I'm bringing to Crux AI, and what we'll build the organization around as we scale."

The company, backed by $5bn from Blackstone, plans to bring 500MW of capacity online in 2027. On its site, the company said that it plans to scale to 2GW of capacity. Data centers will be a mixture of powered shells, build-to-suits, colo blocks, and turnkey partner deals, as well as first-party greenfield development.

“AI presents a generational technological shift and, with it, the opportunity to reimagine the infrastructure powering it from the ground up,” said Treynor Sloss, Crux AI CEO.

“That is what we are building at Crux AI: an integrated platform designed end-to-end to operate reliably at enormous scale. Our ambition is to become the infrastructure company trusted with the workloads that matter most.”

The company, which hired the CFO of Charter Communications earlier this year, plans a major hiring spree. It currently has 17 open positions, including data center construction manager, data center energy manager, head of data center operations, lead supply negotiator, and a VP of capital markets.