Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani on February 19 announced a ₹10 lakh crore investment in artificial intelligence over the next seven years, positioning the move as a nation-building effort rather than a speculative technology bet.
Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Ambani said the world stands at a crossroads: one path leads to scarce, expensive AI controlled by a few, while the other ensures affordable, widely accessible intelligence infrastructure. “This is patient, disciplined nation-building capital,” he said. “It is not for chasing valuation.”
The centrepiece of the plan is the creation of India’s sovereign AI compute backbone. Under the Jio brand, Reliance will build gigawatt-scale data centres and high-performance computing infrastructure designed to lower the cost of AI access for enterprises, start-ups and public services. “The biggest constraint in AI is not scarcity of talent, but the high cost of compute,” Ambani noted, adding that Jio Intelligence will build India’s sovereign compute infrastructure.
Reliance’s strategy builds on Jio’s digital backbone, which disrupted India’s telecom market by making mobile data affordable at scale. Ambani drew a parallel with that transformation, saying Jio connected India to the internet era and would now connect it to the intelligence era.
Beyond infrastructure, the group is expected to focus on AI applications across retail, energy, healthcare, agriculture and financial services—integrating AI into its vast consumer and enterprise ecosystem. By combining cloud infrastructure, edge computing and sector-specific AI models, Reliance aims to embed intelligence into everyday services.
“The best of AI is yet to come,” Ambani said, expressing confidence that artificial intelligence could usher in an era of “super-abundance”—provided it remains accessible, inclusive and built on national capability.
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