Mukesh Ambani, India’s wealthiest person and chairman of Reliance Industry, has announced an ambitious plan to build an AI backbone through its new subsidiary, starting with a strategic partnership with Google Cloud and Meta.
At its 48th Annual Meeting on Friday, Ambani launched a new venture called Reliance Intelligence, a subsidiary of Reliance Industry. The new venture aims to create a nationwide AI infrastructure, including enterprise tools and services for a variety of sectors. This move comes as India appears to be catching up to the global AI race that has long been dominated by the US and China.
“Reliance Intelligence creates homes for world-class researchers, engineers, designers and product builders, combining the speed of research with the rigour of engineering,” Ambani said in his keynote address.
To get things started, Reliance is partnering with Google to be one of its major tech partners, building a dedicated AI cloud infrastructure in India. The network starts at the main data centres in Jamunagar, a city in western Gujarat.
The dedicated cloud region will enable it to trust businesses of all sizes, developers and government agencies to support large-scale deployments using JIO’s network and unique energy assets, the company said in a joint statement.
“As Reliance’s biggest public cloud partner, Google Cloud is not only strengthening its mission-critical workloads, but also innovating its advanced AI initiatives.” “This is just the beginning.”
Google did not immediately respond to questions about the partnership’s financial terms.
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Reliance has announced a joint venture with another major technology investor, Meta, to build and expand enterprise AI solutions for Indian customers and select international markets. Under the agreement, Reliance and Meta committed to a combined investment of £8.55 billion (approximately $100 million) each, based on a 70/30 ownership split.
The partnership will serve as a Lama-based enterprise AI platform in Meta, allowing businesses to customize, deploy and manage their use case generation AI models across sales, marketing, IT, customer service and finance. The joint venture will also offer a suite of pre-configured AI solutions, the company said.
The Reliance collaboration took place a few weeks after Meta rebuilt its AI venture into the new Superintelligence Labs, spurring the adoption of expensive top AI. (Meta is reportedly suspended employment after concerns from shareholders.)
“Through this joint venture, we are making the Meta llama model a real use,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a prepared statement.
The transaction is subject to customary regulatory approval and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Reliance plans to expand beyond India and bring its flagship subsidiary, Reliance Jio platform, into the international market, said Ambani. Ambani also revealed that Jio is aiming to submit an initial public offer in the first half of 2026, following many forecasts and early delays.
Reliance also reportedly focuses on its partnership with Openai, recently introducing a $5 ChatGPT subscription in India and announced plans to set up an office in New Delhi later this year. Details of the partnership are likely to be announced during Sam Altman’s upcoming visit to India next month, two well-versed people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
Reliance and Openai did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
Earlier this year, Reliance’s Arch Rival Bharti Airtel, the second-largest telephone company after Jio, partnered with Prplexity to give more than 360 million Airtel subscribers access to Perplexity Pro for 12 months.
Reliance has already partnered with Microsoft to provide the Azure Cloud platform for Indian companies. The company also offers Jioaicloud, a consumer-centric service that offers 100GB of free storage. The consumer cloud service is used by 40 million users and will be updated with voice search support and AI Create Hub to turn photos into AI-powered reels, collages and promotional videos, the company announced at its annual meeting.
Reliance also introduced Jiofames, an AI-based smart glasses, as an answer to Snap’s glasses and Ray-Ban Meta Glasses. Similarly, the company integrates AI into streaming platform Jiohotstar. It has attracted over 600 million users and 300 million payment subscribers in the three months since its launch in February.
New AI features include “Riya” voice assistant and content translation into Indian using AI-Voice cloning and lip syncing tech.
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