Compute Labs, a startup founded on the vision of bringing more capital to the market for graphics processing units, has started a matchmaking service for companies looking to buy the chips and lenders willing to lend against them.

The move comes as a range of financial firms and startups are ...

In early 2023, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman gathered with Jas Khaira, the company’s lead AI investor, and other top executives at the finance giant’s Park Avenue headquarters in Manhattan for a debate: Should they give billions of dollars to a little-known data center developer—CoreWeave—that they had turned down just a few months earlier?

CoreWeave had gotten Blackstone to return to the table after landing a multiyear, multibillion-dollar contract to sell cloud computing services to Microsoft. It needed $2.3 billion to buy Nvidia GPUs and secure a data center to house them.

In Blackstone’s discussion of the deal, several executives in the room had deep misgivings, according to a person who attended the meeting. CoreWeave was still something of a mystery, a six-year-old, privately held firm that had generated only $16 million in revenue in the previous year. Schwarzman himself was personally worried his investment team could be making a mistake, the person said.