Reliance Intelligence, the deep-tech unit of Reliance Industries, is building what it calls India's sovereign AI backbone in Jamnagar, Gujarat — a 120-megawatt AI infrastructure project that the company says will disrupt AI economics for the country.
Announced at Reliance Industries' 49th Annual General Meeting, the project represents a strategic bet that AI access in India faces the same affordability challenge that mobile data did in 2016, when Jio's entry transformed the telecom market.
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Jamnagar Project Details: 120MW of AI Compute by Year End
Akash Ambani, Managing Director of Jio Platforms, confirmed that the first phase of the Jamnagar project — 120 megawatts of AI infrastructure — will be commissioned by the end of 2026. The facility will be powered entirely by clean energy from Reliance's own solar generation platform in the Kutch region.
Long-term plans call for compute capacity equivalent to over 200,000 H100-equivalent GPUs, positioning Jamnagar as one of the world's largest AI data centre clusters outside of the US and China.
Why India Needs Its Own AI Infrastructure
The scarcity and high cost of compute is the single biggest barrier to AI adoption in India. Indian startups and enterprises currently rely primarily on US-based cloud providers for GPU access, paying premium rates and facing latency issues. A domestic AI infrastructure layer would dramatically reduce costs and enable real-time AI applications at Indian scale.
Akash Ambani stated: "Just as Jio made data extremely affordable for every Indian, Reliance Intelligence will disrupt AI economics by making it dramatically more affordable for every Indian by the end of this decade."
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Reliance Intelligence: Beyond Just Compute
Reliance Intelligence is not just about hardware. The company is embedding AI directly into the heart of the Jio network, bringing intelligence to every Jio call through Jio CallAgent — an AI agent that can transcribe calls, identify up to 10 unique speakers, summarize information, order food, and schedule meetings based on verbal agreements.
MyJio is being transformed from a telecom app into a personal AI agent advisor and relationship manager. AI is also being deployed across Reliance Retail for supply chain and merchandising optimization, at JioStar for multi-lingual content creation, and in the oil-to-chemicals business for process optimization to boost yields and reduce energy consumption.
Broader Indian AI Ecosystem Impact
With partnerships spanning Google, Meta, and NVIDIA, Reliance is positioning itself as the infrastructure backbone for India's AI ambitions. The company's AI services will support 22 Indian languages — a critical requirement for adoption beyond English-speaking users.
However, the Financial Times has noted that Ambani's deep-tech ambitions also reveal India's AI limits. The country faces challenges in chip design talent, semiconductor fabrication, and research funding compared to the US and China. Jamnagar addresses the compute gap but doesn't solve the broader ecosystem challenges.
Reliance's plan to make AI dramatically more affordable mirrors its Jio playbook — massive infrastructure investment, aggressive pricing, and rapid scale. If successful, it could unlock a wave of AI innovation across Indian startups, enterprises, and government services.
Sources: Economic Times, TechRepublic, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Reliance Industries AGM 2026
