Kamal Ghorui
New Delhi: Reliance Industries chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani on Thursday said his conglomerate has lined up investments of $110 billion (Rs 10 lakh crore) to build India’s sovereign artificial intelligence infrastructure. At a scale befitting India’s ambition, the oil-to-telecom conglomerate plans to invest the mega-sum over seven years to build India’s sovereign artificial intelligence infrastructure, including data centres and a nationwide edge compute network, Ambani said. Data centres, the backbone of artificial intelligence, house the high-performance chips and servers required to train and run large AI models, a process that demands enormous computing power. They also consume a lot of electricity. Reliance Industries and Jio would “connect India to the intelligence era” after having connected it to affordable broadband, Ambani said. “This is patient, disciplined nation-building capital,” he said, adding that India “cannot afford to rent intelligence” and must reduce the cost of compute as dramatically as it reduced the cost of data. Last month, Ambani had announced large investments in data centres in Gujarat. On Thursday, he said construction has begun on multi-gigawatt AI-ready data centres in Jamnagar, with over 120 megawatts expected to come online in the second half of 2026. The facilities will be backed by up to 10 gigawatts of green energy capacity in Kutch and Andhra Pradesh. A nationwide edge layer integrated with Jio’s telecom network will bring low-latency AI services closer to users, from kirana stores to farms and clinics. The data centres business in India is expected to fire up with the Union Budget 2026-27 introducing a tax holiday until 2047 for foreign cloud service providers using Indian data centres for global operations. “India will emerge as one of the greatest AI powers in the world in the 21st century,” Ambani said. He further outlined five principles guiding what he called “Jio Intelligence,” multilingual AI across Indian languages, data residency and security, productivity-led use cases, job creation through high-skill work, and ecosystem partnerships with enterprises, startups, IITs and research institutions. AI must be driven by “social relevance, not momentary craze,” he said, calling for global cooperation in areas such as chips and critical minerals, warning against hoarding and polarisation. “For the first time, humans are creating human-like systems that can learn, speak, analyse, move and produce autonomously. AI is the Mantra that powers every Yantra or every machine and system. To work faster, better and smarter. I see AI as a modern day Akshay Patra, the legendary vessel in Mahabharat that provided endless nourishment to all,” he said.
