'India cannot rent intelligence': Mukesh Ambani says Reliance to invest ₹10 lakh crore in AI push

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani on Thursday announced a ₹10 lakh crore investment by Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) over the next seven years as he unveiled plans to build India’s sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) compute infrastructure.

Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Ambani said India will emerge as one of the world’s leading AI powers in the 21st century, backed by its digital public infrastructure, scale of data generation and growing startup ecosystem.

“Jio connected India to the internet era. Jio will now connect India to the intelligence era,” Ambani said.

He said that the group will deliver AI capabilities to every citizen, sector and government service with the same affordability that transformed mobile data access.

"Jio with Reliance will invest ₹10 lakh cr over the next 7 years starting this year," he said. "This is not speculative investment. It is not for chasing valuation. This is patient, disciplined nation-building capital."

Highlighting that the biggest constraint in AI today is the scarcity and high cost of compute, Ambani announced that Jio Intelligence will build large-scale domestic capacity through gigawatt data centres, green energy-backed power and a nationwide edge-compute network integrated with Jio’s telecom infrastructure.

He said construction has already begun on AI-ready facilities, with over 120 megawatts of capacity expected to come online in the second half of 2026, and a clear roadmap to reach gigawatt-scale compute for training and inference.

Ambani also pointed to Reliance’s surplus green power, anchored by solar projects in Kutch and Andhra Pradesh, to support energy-intensive AI infrastructure.

“India cannot afford to rent intelligence. Therefore, we will reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as we did the cost of data,” he said.

Ambani asserted that AI would not eliminate jobs but create higher-skilled opportunities, as Reliance works with global technology partners “not as importers of intelligence, but as co-architects of a new AI century”.