Bikash Koley, Google's vice president of global infrastructure and capacity, has left the company after more than 16 years across two tenures to become chief technology and product officer at Crux AI, the Blackstone-Google joint venture neocloud built on Google's TPU chips.

Crux plans to bring 500MW of capacity online in 2027 and scale quickly to 2GW, making Koley's hire a direct bet on his track record of running hyperscale infrastructure.

The move reunites Koley with Crux chief executive Benjamin Treynor Sloss, a former Google VP of engineering who runs the new business. Last month, Crux also hired Alan Duong, previously VP and head of data center engineering and construction at Meta.

What does Koley bring to Crux?

At Google, Koley oversaw global infrastructure and capacity for the hyperscaler — the compute estate Crux now aims to replicate at smaller scale on TPUs. His career before Google includes:

• CTO and EVP at Juniper Networks
• Founder and CTO of Qstreams Networks
• Lead engineer at Ciena

Announcing the move on LinkedIn, Koley credited the Google infrastructure teams for the reliability of the systems he helped build.

"From laying the groundwork for a resilient global fabric, to pushing the envelope on modern consumable infrastructure, none of it would have been possible without the relentless curiosity, execution rigor, and unwavering commitment of the Google infrastructure teams to keeping the packets forwarding, the tokens serving, and the queries flowing," Koley said.

He framed the Crux role as a continuation of that work rather than a departure from it. "The pursuit to engineer and scale next-generation infrastructure continues, and I am thrilled to partner once again with Benjamin Treynor Sloss to tackle what comes next," he said.

Why does this hire matter for the neocloud market?

Crux AI is one of the most closely watched entrants in the TPU neocloud segment. The Blackstone-Google joint venture has now pulled senior infrastructure leadership from two of the three largest hyperscalers within a single month — Duong from Meta in the previous hiring round, and now Koley from Google itself.

The 500MW target for 2027, with a planned rapid scale to 2GW, puts Crux in direct competition with established GPU neoclouds, while relying on Google's TPU silicon rather than Nvidia hardware. Koley's appointment signals that the venture intends to build that fleet using hyperscale-era engineering practices rather than colocation-era ones.

For Google, the departure removes a long-tenured leader from its infrastructure organization at a moment when the company is racing to expand its own TPU and data center capacity. For Crux, it adds an executive who has already operated networks and infrastructure at the multi-gigawatt scale the startup aims to reach.