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)
