Reliance Industries (RIL) and Jio will invest Rs 10 lakh crore over seven years as the conglomerate looks to play a major role in India’s AI transformation and make AI affordable and accessible for citizens, RIL Chairman and MD Mukesh Ambani said on Thursday.
According to Ambani, after connecting “India to the Internet era”, Jio will connect the country to the “intelligence era” by reducing the cost as “dramatically” as the company did for mobile and internet data earlier.
At the India AI Impact Summit, he announced Jio Intelligence—RIL’s AI-focussed arm—will build India’s sovereign compute infrastructure, and the conglomerate will partner with best tech companies globally not as importers of AI, but as “co-architects of a new AI century”.
On the investment announcement, he said, “This is not speculative investment. It is not for chasing valuation. This is a patient, disciplined, nation-building capital, designed to create durable economic value and strategic resilience for six decades to come,” he said.
Likening AI to Akshaya Patra, Ambani said it offers limitless augmentation in knowledge, efficiency, and productivity.
A central question around AI today, he said, is whether it will concentrate power in the hands of a few or will it democratise opportunity for all, and added that India believes in the latter—a future where AI is “available, affordable, and beneficial to all”.
He also said that success of the AI movement globally hinges critically on cooperation and sharing “be it chips or rare earths” and not hoarding, and that India has a unique strength in that context as it serves as a “vital bridge” between the Global South and Global North.
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Ambani asserted India will emerge as “one of the greatest AI powers” in this century as no other country can match its strength in “demography, democracy, development, digital infrastructure, data generation, and AI harvest”.
Emphasising that Jio will deliver AI to Indians at highly affordable prices, Ambani said, “… Jio will do so with the same reliability, quality, scale, and extreme affordability that transformed connectivity. India cannot afford to rent intelligence. Therefore, we will reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as we did the cost of data.”
Ambani said Jio Intelligence will build India’s sovereign compute infrastructure through “three bold initiatives”— gigawatt-scale data centres, ready green power surplus, and a nationwide edge compute.
“We have already started construction on multi-gigawatt, AI-ready data-centres at Jamnagar. Over 120 MW will come online in the second half of 2026 this year, and a clear path to gigawatt-scale compute for training and large-scale inference… We have an in-house energy advantage with up to 10 GW of ready green-power surplus, anchored by solar in both Kutch and Andhra Pradesh,” Ambani said.
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“An edge-compute layer, deeply integrated with Jio’s network, will make intelligence responsive, low-latency and affordable — close to where Indians live, learn and work… Our resolve is clear: make intelligence as ubiquitous as connectivity,” he added.
The RIL chairman said Jio Intelligence is guided by five “non-negotiable principles”, including a commitment to multilingual AI capability across all Indian languages and a promise that AI will create new high-skilled work opportunities rather than displacing jobs. The other principles include making AI accessible to agriculture and informal sectors, and small businesses, keeping “responsibility, security, data residency, and trust as Jio’s core guarantees”, and building a deep partnership ecosystem with Indian enterprises, startups, and top technology and research institutes.