In a bold move that mirrors its historical disruption of the telecommunications sector, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) has announced a staggering ₹10 lakh crore (approximately $110 billion) investment over the next seven years to build India’s foundational artificial intelligence infrastructure. Addressing the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi on February 19, Chairman Mukesh Ambani declared that the “Jio moment” for intelligence has arrived, pledging to drive down the cost of AI compute as dramatically as the company did for mobile data a decade ago.
Building India’s Sovereign AI Backbone
The investment, beginning in 2026, marks one of the largest private-sector commitments to AI globally. At the heart of this strategy is the creation of “Jio Intelligence,” a dedicated vertical designed to establish India’s sovereign compute infrastructure. Ambani emphasized that “India cannot afford to rent intelligence,” signaling a strategic pivot away from reliance on foreign cloud providers and toward a self-reliant domestic ecosystem.
The rollout is anchored by three primary initiatives:
- Gigawatt-Scale Data Centers: Reliance has already commenced construction on multi-gigawatt, AI-ready data centers in Jamnagar, Gujarat. The first phase, featuring over 120 megawatts of capacity, is scheduled to go live in the second half of 2026. These facilities are designed to handle massive training and inference workloads for the next generation of large language models (LLMs).
- The Green Energy Advantage: To power these energy-intensive facilities, Reliance is leveraging its internal green energy ecosystem. The conglomerate plans to utilize a 10-gigawatt surplus of green power, primarily solar-driven, from its vast installations in Kutch and Andhra Pradesh.
- Nationwide Edge Computing: By integrating an edge-compute layer directly into Jio’s 5G network, the company aims to deliver low-latency AI services close to where users live and work. This distributed architecture ensures that intelligence is responsive and affordable for everyone, from rural farmers to urban enterprises.
Redefining Work and Wealth: The Social Impact
Addressing the widespread anxiety regarding job losses, Ambani offered a reassuring outlook, asserting that AI will be a creator of high-skill employment rather than a destroyer of work. He likened AI to a “modern-day Akshaya Patra,” offering limitless productivity and knowledge augmentation. The group’s “Jio Shikshak” and “Jio Arogya” initiatives are already showcasing this vision by providing AI-powered educational assistance in 22 Indian languages and delivering medical guidance to remote areas in under five minutes.
The strategy also includes a deep partnership ecosystem with Indian startups, IITs, and research institutions. By providing affordable compute and co-development platforms, Reliance aims to catalyze a “people’s movement” in AI, ensuring that the technology democratizes opportunity rather than concentrating power in the hands of a global few.
A Competitive Landscape and Future Outlook
The ₹10 lakh crore announcement comes amid a wave of infrastructure spending in India. With the Adani Group committing $100 billion for AI-ready centers by 2035 and global giants like Microsoft and Google expanding their regional hubs, India is rapidly becoming the world’s most contested AI battleground. Reliance’s advantage lies in its “full-stack” approach—owning the connectivity (Jio), the power (Green Energy), and now the compute (Data Centers).
As the company prepares to list Jio Platforms on the exchanges, this investment is being characterized not as speculative capital, but as “disciplined, nation-building capital” intended to secure India’s strategic resilience for the next six decades.
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