Private sector behemoth Reliance Industries (RIL) and its digital services arm Jio will invest as much as Rs 10 lakh crore over seven years as the conglomerate looks to play a major role in India’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) transformation and make AI affordable and accessible for citizens all over the country, RIL Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani said Thursday at the India AI Impact Summit.
According to Ambani, after connecting “India to the Internet era”, Jio will connect the country to the “intelligence era” by reducing the cost of intelligence as “dramatically” as the company did for mobile and internet data earlier. He announced that Jio Intelligence—RIL’s AI-focussed arm—will build India’s sovereign compute infrastructure, and the conglomerate will partner with the best tech companies globally not as importers of AI, but as “co-architects of a new AI century”.
Likening AI to Akshaya Patra—“the legendary vessel in Mahabharata that provided endless nourishment to all”—Ambani said that it offers limitless augmentation in knowledge, efficiency, and productivity. However, he underscored that a central question around AI today is whether it will concentrate power in the hands of a few or will it democratise opportunity for all, and 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.
Ambani predicted that India will emerge as “one of the greatest AI powers” in this century as no other country can match India’s strength in “demography, democracy, development, digital infrastructure, data generation, and AI harvest”.
“Jio, together with Reliance, will invest Rs 10 lakh crore over the next seven years starting this year. This is not speculative investment. It is not for chasing valuation. This is patient, disciplined, nation-building capital—designed to create durable economic value and strategic resilience for six decades to come,” he said.
Emphasising that Jio will deliver AI to Indians at highly affordable prices, Ambani said, “We will deliver intelligence to every citizen, every sector of the economy, every facet of social development, and every service of government. 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 asserted that the biggest constraint in AI current is the scarcity and high cost of compute, and to deal with that, 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 are 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.
“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 that 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.
“We will work shoulder-to-shoulder with India’s leading industrial groups to embed AI across manufacturing, logistics, energy, finance, retail, agriculture and healthcare. We will empower startups with affordable compute and co-development platforms. We will aspire to produce global breakthroughs in compute architecture, foundation models, and energy efficiency—designed in India, rooted in our values, powered by our talent, and scaled for humanity,” Ambani said.
Curated by Aisha Patel
