New Delhi: Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani on Thursday announced an unprecedented ₹10 lakh crore investment commitment in artificial intelligence over the next seven years, positioning the outlay as a nation-scale effort to build sovereign AI infrastructure and make advanced intelligence affordable and accessible across India.
Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi under the government’s IndiaAI Mission framework, Ambani described the initiative as one of the largest corporate AI investments globally and framed it as a foundational step in India’s digital and economic transformation.
“Jio with Reliance will invest ₹10 lakh crore over the next seven years starting this year,” Ambani said. “This is not a speculative investment. It is not for chasing valuation. This is patient, disciplined nation-building capital.”
AI at an inflection point
Ambani characterised artificial intelligence as being at a very early stage of its full potential, capable of ushering in what he called an era of “super-abundance.” He argued that the world currently stands at a fork: one path where AI remains scarce and expensive and controlled by a few, and another where intelligence becomes widely affordable and democratised.
India, he said, must decisively pursue the latter.
“India cannot afford to rent intelligence,” Ambani asserted, stressing the importance of domestic AI capabilities rather than dependence on imported infrastructure or models. He added that Jio’s ambition is to reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as it reduced the cost of data during India’s telecom revolution.
Sovereign compute and gigawatt-scale data centres
A central pillar of the investment will be the creation of sovereign compute capacity through what Ambani described as “Jio Intelligence” — Reliance’s AI infrastructure and services platform.
He identified compute cost—not talent—as the primary bottleneck in AI expansion globally. To address this, Jio Intelligence will build large-scale AI-ready data centres in India, including multi-gigawatt facilities powered by green energy.
Construction has already begun on AI-ready data centre capacity in Jamnagar, with over 3 GW expected to come online in the second half of 2026 and a roadmap to scale further. Ambani said abundant domestic compute would enable affordable AI training and inference for Indian enterprises, startups and public sector applications.
From internet era to intelligence era
Positioning Jio’s AI push as the next phase of its digital connectivity mission, Ambani said the company’s role in connecting India through broadband, 4G and 5G would now extend into what he called the “intelligence era.”
“With over 900 million subscribers, Jio played a leading role in connecting India through broadband, 4G and 5G. We will now play an even bigger role in connecting India to intelligence,” he said.
Jio aims to deliver AI-driven capabilities to citizens, businesses and government at national scale with the same reliability, reach and affordability that transformed mobile data access.
Cross-sector AI adoption and national ambition
The ₹10 lakh crore investment will span AI infrastructure, platforms, research and sector-specific applications across manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, education, retail and financial services.
Ambani framed the programme as critical to India’s ambition of becoming a fully developed nation by 2047, arguing that the country’s strengths in demography, democracy, digital public infrastructure and data generation uniquely position it to become a global AI leader.
He also underscored the importance of inclusive and multilingual AI, saying intelligence must be accessible in every Indian language and tailored to farmers, small businesses, students and healthcare providers—not just large enterprises.
AI, he concluded, should serve as a productivity multiplier across both the formal and informal economy, enabling broad-based economic growth and long-term strategic resilience for India.
