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Reliance joins hands with Google Cloud to put India’s AI future on steroids

Published

6 months ago

August 29, 2025

MUMBAI: Reliance Industries has never done things by halves. On 29 August, India’s largest private company unfurled its latest grand project: a sweeping expansion of its alliance with Google Cloud, centred on a new, dedicated AI-first cloud region in Jamnagar, Gujarat. The ambition is as audacious as it is familiar. Having once upended India’s telecoms industry with Reliance Jio and cheap data, Mukesh Ambani is now training his firepower on artificial intelligence, promising to democratise access to computing muscle for the world’s most populous country.

The project is being pitched as India’s “AI leapfrog moment.” Reliance will design, build, and power state-of-the-art cloud facilities, all running on renewable energy and plugged into Jio’s sprawling fibre and digital network. Google will provide the brains: its AI hyper computer, a secure and integrated generative AI stack, and the know-how to run workloads of breath taking intensity. The facility, Reliance says, will meet global service-level standards and support the most demanding AI use cases—from training large models to building next-generation applications for consumers and enterprises.

Why Jamnagar? The coastal city is already the beating heart of Reliance’s refining and petrochemicals empire. It is also becoming a symbol of the company’s reinvention: its green energy giga factory is rising there, and now the AI cloud campus will sit alongside it. Running on renewable power, the project ticks boxes for sustainability even as it scales to hyper speed. Jio, meanwhile, will string high-capacity fibre links connecting Jamnagar to metros like Mumbai and Delhi, effectively wiring India’s AI ambitions to its business and political capitals.

Mukesh Ambani cast the partnership in almost civilisational terms: “Just as Jio and Google came together to democratise the internet for every Indian, we will now democratise intelligence for every Indian,” he declared. The subtext was clear: Reliance does not want to merely be a customer of AI; it wants to be the platform on which India builds its AI future.

For Google, the tie-up is equally strategic. The American giant has long struggled to monetise India at scale, despite Android’s dominance. Its alliance with Reliance, first forged through a $4.5bn investment in Jio Platforms in 2020, has been its best bet. Sundar Pichai, Google’s boss, was almost wistful: “Our work together over the last decade has helped bring affordable internet access to millions. And now, we are building on this to help shape the next leap with AI. This is only the beginning.”

The beginning it may be, but the context is fiercer. Microsoft has partnered with the Adani group to push Azure into Indian enterprises. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has invested heavily in local data centres. By anchoring Google Cloud in Reliance’s infrastructure, Ambani is offering it the biggest distribution muscle in the country—from India’s biggest retailer to its mightiest mobile operator.

Reliance has always built moats around scale and integration. Hydrocarbons fed petrochemicals; petrochemicals funded telecoms; telecoms birthed digital platforms; retail wrapped around them. Now AI is being woven into every strand. Reliance’s retail arm, one of the world’s fastest-growing, will be powered by predictive analytics and AI-first services. Its digital platforms can churn out generative-AI-powered customer tools. Even its energy and refining business can tap AI for predictive maintenance, efficiency, and emissions management.

The bet is as much about geopolitics as economics. AI compute has become a strategic resource, akin to oil in the 20th century. By hosting a dedicated, hyperscale AI cloud region in India, Reliance and Google are hedging against global bottlenecks in semiconductors and compute availability. They are also offering Indian enterprises and the government a “sovereign-flavoured” cloud alternative to relying wholly on Western or Chinese platforms.

The entire project will be underpinned by Reliance’s push into renewable power. The AI data centres, notorious for their energy hunger, will be fed through Reliance’s green energy parks and hydrogen initiatives. Jio’s high-capacity fibre, spanning metros and regions, adds the digital sinew to match the green muscle. The combination allows Reliance to brand the initiative not merely as profitable, but as sustainable—a key card to play with regulators, policymakers, and global investors.

For India, the stakes are towering. Domestic enterprises, startups, and public sector organisations often face prohibitive costs in accessing cutting-edge AI compute. By pooling Reliance’s infrastructure with Google’s stack, the hope is to lower barriers and accelerate adoption. Small businesses may soon have access to AI tools that were once the preserve of Silicon Valley. Universities and research institutes could run high-performance AI models without prohibitive cost. And the government could scale citizen-facing AI services in health, education, and agriculture.

But challenges remain. Building AI facilities is one thing; ensuring India has the talent, regulation, and guardrails to use them responsibly is another. AI also raises thorny issues of bias, surveillance, and security. Reliance’s ambition to become India’s AI backbone will inevitably attract scrutiny—whether from privacy hawks, antitrust watchdogs, or foreign competitors.

Yet, if history is a guide, Reliance has a knack for bending markets to its will. When Jio entered telecoms in 2016, it offered free calls and dirt-cheap data, triggering a brutal price war that wiped out rivals and left India with the world’s cheapest mobile internet. Now, Ambani appears ready to repeat the trick with AI: offer access at scale, bundle services across Reliance’s ecosystem, and set the floor so low that competitors struggle to keep up.

The Jamnagar AI cloud, then, is not just about servers and software. It is about a new architecture of power: technological, economic, and political. If it works, Reliance and Google may indeed make India a global leader in artificial intelligence. If it fails, it could end up as another white elephant in the deserts of Jamnagar.
For now, though, one thing is certain. India’s AI race has just been given a jolt of steroids—and Mukesh Ambani is holding the syringe.

(The picture featured above is representational of two businessmen joining hands and there is no intention to insinuate that it resembles either Mukesh Ambani or Sunder Pichai. It is an AI generated image)

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Why Sam Altman was fired: Microsoft CTO email reveals board failure

Published

4 weeks ago

February 7, 2026

indiantelevision.com Team

WASHINGTON: At OpenAI, the fight was not about artificial intelligence going rogue—it was about who got the GPUs.
An internal email from Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott, sent on November 19, 2023, offers the clearest account yet of the events that culminated in the sudden firing of Sam Altman as OpenAI’s chief executive. Far from a single ideological rupture, Scott describes a combustible mix of resource wars, bruised egos and a board ill-equipped to manage the world’s hottest AI company.

According to the email, addressed to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, president Brad Smith and other senior leaders, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever had been “increasingly at odds” with Altman on two fronts.

Read the full email below to find out:

[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

From: Kevin Scott

Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2023 7:31 AM

To: Frank X. Shaw, Satya Nadella, Brad Smith, Amy Hood, Caitlin McCabe

Frank,

I can help you with the timeline and with our best understanding of what was going on. I think the reality was that a member of the board, llya Sutskever, had been increasingly at odds with his boss, Sam, over a variety of issues.

One of those issues is that there is a perfectly natural tension inside of the company between Research and Applied over resource allocations. The success of Applied has meant that headcount and GPUs got allocated to things like the API and ChatGPT. Research, which is responsible for training new models, could always use more GPUs because what they’re doing is literally insatiable, and it’s easy for them to look at the success of Applied and believe that in a zero sum game they are responsible for them waiting for GPUs to become available to do their work. I could tell you stories like this from every place l’ve ever worked, and it boils down to, even if you have two important, super successful things you’re trying to work on simultaneously, folks rarely think about the global optima. They believe that their thing is more important, and that to the extent that things are zero sum, that the other thing is a cause of their woes. It’s why Sam has pushed us so hard on capacity: he’s the one thing about the global optima and trying to make things non-zero sum. The researchers at OAl do not appreciate that they would not have anywhere remotely as many GPUs as they do have if there were no Applied at all, and that Applied has a momentum all its own that must be fed. So the only reasonable thing to do is what Sam has been doing: figure out how to get more compute.

The second of the issues, and one that’s deeply personal to llya, is that Jakub moreso than Ilya has been making the research breakthroughs that are driving things forward, to the point that Sam promoted Jakub, and put him charge of the major model research directions. After he did that, Jakub’s work accelerated, and he’s made some truly stunning progress that has accelerated in the past few weeks. I think that Ilya has had a very, very hard time with this, with this person that used to work for him suddenly becoming the leader, and perhaps more importantly, for solving the problem that Ilya has been trying to solve the past few years with little or no progress. Sam made the right choice as CEO here by promoting Jakub.

Now, in a normal company, if you don’t like these two things, you’d appeal to your boss, and if he/she tells you that they’ve made their decision and that it’s final, your recourse is accept the decision or quit. Here, and this is the piece that everyone should have been thinking harder about, the employee was also a founder and board member, and the board constitution was such that they were highly susceptible to a pitch by Ilya that portrays the decisions that Sam was making as bad. I think the things that made them susceptible, is that two of the board members were effective altruism folks who all things equal would like to have an infinite bag of money to build AGI-like things, just to study and ponder, but not to do anything with. None of them were experienced enough with running things, or understood the dynamic at OAI well enough to understand that firing Sam not only would not solve any of the concerns they had, but would make them worse. And none of them had experience, and didn’t seek experience out, in how to handle something like a CEO transition, certainly not for the hottest company in the world.

The actual timeline of events through Friday afternoon as I understand them:

Thursday late night, the board let’s Mira know what they’re going to do. By board, it’s Ilya, Tash, Helen, and Adam.

Mira calls me and Satya about 10-15 minutes before the board talks to Sam. This is the first either of us had heard of any of this. Mira sounded like she had been run over by a truck as she tells me.

OAl Board notifies Sam at noon on Friday that he’s out, and that Greg is off the board, and immediately does a blog post.

OAl all hands at 2P to rattled staff.

Greg resigns. He was blindsided and hadn’t been in the board deliberations, and hadn’t agreed to stay.

Jakub and a whole horde of researchers reach out to Sam and Greg trying to understand what happened, expressing loyalty to them, and saying they will resign.

Friday night Jakub and a handful of others resign.

eNews

Loop AI raises $14m series A to boost restaurant delivery operations

Published

1 month ago

February 4, 2026

indiantelevision.com Team

CALIFORNIA: Loop AI has just served itself a sizeable helping of fresh capital. The enterprise AI company focused on the restaurant and retail back office has raised $14 million in a Series A round, led by fintech investor Nyca Partners, signalling growing confidence in the future of food delivery as a profit engine rather than a margin killer.

Alongside the funding, Osama Bedier, former executive at Google and GoDaddy and now an investment partner at Nyca, will take a seat on Loop AI’s board. His arrival adds heavyweight experience as the company enters its next phase of growth.

Loop AI operates where artificial intelligence meets operational grit. Its platform helps restaurants manage the often messy realities of delivery, from margins and workflows to customer behaviour, using what it calls agentic workflows to automate and optimise back-of-house decisions.

Bedier believes the timing could not be better. With restaurants under pressure to deliver better customer experiences while running leaner operations, AI is fast becoming a necessity rather than a nice-to-have. He praised founders Anand Tumuluru and Sundar for building technology he sees as essential to the future of dining.

The backdrop is a delivery market that is ballooning fast. In 2025, the US delivery sector is estimated at $140 billion, accounting for about 10 per cent of the market. By 2035, that figure is expected to swell to $1 trillion, with delivery claiming nearly a third of all restaurant sales. What was once an add-on is quickly becoming the main course.

For Loop AI, delivery is not just another channel, it is the new drive-through. As eating habits tilt ever further towards takeout and doorstep dining, the company’s mission is to help restaurants grow without watching profits evaporate along the way.

Customers appear to be buying into the pitch. California-based casual dining brand Lazy Dog credits Loop AI with helping power rapid growth in its delivery business, while fast-casual chain Starbird says the platform has turned third-party delivery from a necessary evil into a viable growth lever.

Since 2024, Loop AI has grown sixfold and now supports thousands of restaurants. The new funding will be used to expand its product offering and hire across its offices in New York, San Francisco, Tampa and Bangalore.

In an industry where delivery has long been blamed for thin margins and operational headaches, Loop AI is betting that smarter systems can finally make the maths work. For restaurant operators juggling kitchens, couriers and customers, that could be a recipe worth following.

eNews

Food for thought Feeding India serves 23 crore meals and counting

Published

1 month ago

January 29, 2026

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Hunger may be stubborn, but Feeding India is proving it is not unbeatable. The not-for-profit has served more than 23 crore meals over the past seven years, turning nourishment into a nationwide movement that now spans over 150 cities, according to its Annual Report for FY 2024–25.

Titled A Year of Nourishing Dreams, the report captures a year in which the organisation sharpened its focus from simply filling plates to shaping futures. At the heart of its work is the fight against child malnutrition, with Feeding India now supporting over 1.4 lakh children every day through its partner network.

Its daily feeding programme has grown into a vast ecosystem, covering 1,097 partner schools and 726 Anganwadi centres. These include 275 formal schools, 720 informal learning centres, 58 schools for children with disabilities, and 32 orphan homes. Menus are tailored to local tastes, from rajma chawal in the North to idli sambhar in the South, ensuring meals are nutritious, culturally familiar and widely accepted. Food is provided through a mix of on-site kitchens and centralised cooking facilities.

Recognising that malnutrition often begins long before children enter classrooms, Feeding India has stepped deeper into early childhood care. Across districts such as Gurugram, Kushinagar and Varanasi, the organisation has worked with 726 Anganwadi centres, impacting around 27,000 children aged 0–6 years. More than 30 Anganwadis have been upgraded using Building as Learning Aid concepts, creating brighter, safer and more child-friendly spaces. In Varanasi, a pilot programme now provides full breakfast and lunch meals, a significant shift from the usual supplementary snacks.

The year also tested the organisation’s ability to respond in crisis. During 2024–25, Feeding India distributed nearly 2,000 ration kits following floods in Assam and landslides in Kerala, and served over 1.9 lakh hot meals after the Uttarakhand cloudburst. Relief operations extended to Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in the wake of Cyclone Fengal.

Community participation remains central to the model. Events such as the Zomato Feeding India Concert, featuring Dua Lipa, brought together 28,000 people in 2024, while initiatives like Poshan Potli nutrition kits supported tuberculosis patients during recovery in Varanasi.

Funding patterns underline the power of platforms. Zomato users contributed nearly 80 per cent of total funds, amounting to Rs 74 crore, while Blinkit customers added 15 per cent, or Rs 14 crore. The remaining around 5 per cent came from institutional donors, employees and direct website contributions. Donors can track their impact directly via the Zomato or Blinkit apps, seeing how many meals they have funded and where those meals were served.

The report also highlights tangible outcomes. At the Malvi Educational and Charitable Trust in Gujarat, students recorded an average BMI improvement of 9.50 per cent after daily nutritious meals were introduced.

“Every meal represents hope, dignity and opportunity for a child who might otherwise go hungry,” a Feeding India spokesperson said, adding that the focus remains on nourishing potential through nutrition, infrastructure and care.

As the numbers grow, the message is simple but powerful, feeding a child today is an investment in tomorrow, and Feeding India is determined to keep that promise alive, one meal at a time.