India’s top telco, Reliance Jio, has announced plans to spend $110 billion on datacenters to run AI workloads and says it will use them to deliver services with the same “extreme affordability” it brought to the mobile communications market.
Jio launched its mobile network in 2016 and within half a year won 100 million subscribers by offering plans that included unlimited data at prices that significantly undercut competitors. It later introduced its own handsets, some that cost around $12, which helped it to become India’s number one telco three years after launch. It later cemented its position with a $27 smartphone created with help from Google, a rapid 5G rollout, and cheap subscriptions that bundle streamed content with carriage.
This is not speculative investment. It is not purchasing valuation
Indian authorities say the carrier now has 514 million subscribers and 51 percent of the Indian mobile comms market. India now enjoys some of the lowest mobile data costs in the world.
Company chairman Mukesh Ambani yesterday announced Jio’s intention to spend $110 billion on AI infrastructure over seven years.
“This is not speculative investment. It is not purchasing valuation,” he said in a speech at India’s AI Impact Summit. “This is patient, disciplined, nation-building capital designed to create durable economic value and strategic resilience for decades to come.”
Ambani added his belief that “the biggest constraint in AI today is not talent or imagination. It is scarcity and high cost of compute.” Jio will therefore build multiple gigawatts of datacenter capacity that Ambani said will operate 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.”
Given Jio’s dominance of Indian mobile telecoms, the company could well do the same for consumer AI services.
That’s not necessarily bad news for western AI companies because Jio also announced a partnership that will see some of its products include OpenAI’s search service.
OpenAI, meanwhile, announced a formal presence in India to serve the 100 million users it already has there. The company also said it will build sovereign AI capabilities for India by becoming a tenant in datacenters operated by Tata Group, a giant industrial conglomerate that has pledged it will build 100MW of AI infrastructure for OpenAI. Tata may scale that to 1GW.
India’s AI summit has certainly attracted plenty of attention, with 17 national leaders attending (plus three deputy leaders). OpenAI boss Sam Altman attended. So did Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who delivered an anodyne speech. Bill Gates cancelled his appearance – reportedly to ensure his presence in the Epstein files did not distract from the event.
Indian lawmakers have hailed the event as establishing the nation as an AI leader, a claim that’s a little hard to support, as while the nation remains a major source of technology talent and intends widespread use of AI in government services, it lacks significant AI infrastructure and has not yet produced a major company in the field.
Maybe Jio will fill that role, given its past successes. ®
