Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and chairman of Reliance Industries, has unveiled an ambitious plan to build the country’s AI backbone through a new subsidiary — starting with strategic partnerships with Google Cloud and Meta.
At the company’s 48th annual general meeting on Friday, Ambani launched a new venture called Reliance Intelligence, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries. The new venture aims to create a national-scale AI infrastructure, including enterprise tools and services for a variety of sectors. The move comes as India looks to catch up in the global AI race long dominated by the U.S. and China.
“Reliance Intelligence will create a home for world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and product builders, combining the speed of research with the rigor of engineering,” Ambani said in his keynote, “so that ideas become innovations and applications, providing solutions to India and the world.”
To kick things off, Reliance has partnered with Google — one of its major tech partners — to build a dedicated AI cloud infrastructure in India. The network will start with a major data center in Jamnagar, a city in the western state of Gujarat.
The dedicated cloud region will enable Reliance to offer AI-focused services to businesses of all sizes, developers, and government bodies, utilizing Jio’s network and its own energy assets to support large-scale deployments, the companies said in their joint statement.
“As Reliance’s largest public cloud partner, Google Cloud is not only powering the company’s mission-critical workloads, but we are also innovating with you on advanced AI initiatives,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a video message during the company’s virtual AGM. “This is only the beginning.”
Google did not immediately respond to a query about the financial terms of the partnership.
Reliance has also announced a joint venture with Meta, another of its major tech investors, to build and scale enterprise AI solutions for customers in India and select international markets. Under the agreement, Reliance and Meta have committed a combined investment of ₹8.55 billion (approximately $100 million) under a 70:30 ownership split, respectively.
The partnership will offer Meta’s Llama-based enterprise AI platform-as-a-service, allowing businesses to customize, deploy, and manage generative AI models for use cases across sales, marketing, IT, customer service, and finance. The joint venture will also provide a suite of pre-configured AI solutions, the companies said.
Reliance’s collaboration comes just weeks after Meta restructured its AI ventures into a new Superintelligence Labs, fueled by an expensive string of top AI hires. (Meta has reportedly pausing the hiring spree after concern from shareholders.)
