Mukesh Ambani announces Rs 10 lakh crore AI investment, backs sovereign compute vision

At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, hosted in New Delhi under the government’s IndiaAI Mission framework, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries, announced a ₹10 lakh crore investment in artificial intelligence (AI) over the next seven years, marking one of the largest corporate commitments to AI in India to date.

“This is not a speculative investment. This is a patient, disciplined, nation-building capital designed to create durable economic value and strategic resilience for decades to come,” Ambani said.

Calling the global AI Impact Summit a “defining moment in India’s tech history,” Ambani said the investment would be directed toward building sovereign AI infrastructure, reducing the cost of compute, and delivering intelligence at scale across sectors.

He outlined three major announcements around Jio Platforms and its role in India’s AI transformation.

First, Ambani said that after connecting India to the internet era, Jio will now connect the country to the intelligence era. The company aims to deliver AI-driven services to every citizen, every sector of the economy, and every arm of government with the same reliability, scale, and affordability that transformed mobile data access in the country.

“India cannot afford to rent intelligence,” Ambani asserted, underlining the need to build domestic AI capabilities rather than depend on imported infrastructure and services. He said Jio’s ambition is to reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as it reduced the cost of data during the telecom revolution.

Second, Ambani confirmed that Jio, together with Reliance, will invest ₹10 lakh crore over the next seven years starting this year. The capital will be deployed across AI infrastructure, platforms, research, and sector-specific applications spanning manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, education, retail, and financial services.

He emphasized that the investment is aimed at long-term value creation and strategic resilience, positioning India as a global AI powerhouse.

Third, Ambani announced that Jio Intelligence will build India’s sovereign compute infrastructure through large-scale AI-ready data centers. Construction has already begun on multi-gigawatt data center capacity in Jamnagar. Over 120 MW of AI-ready capacity is expected to come online in the second half of 2026, with a clear roadmap to scale up to gigawatt-level compute power to support large-scale AI training and inference.

He described compute as the biggest constraint in AI today and said building domestic, green-energy-powered data centers would ensure that India has affordable and abundant AI capacity.

Framing the announcements within India’s broader digital transformation, Ambani said, “With over 500 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.”

Ambani further positioned AI as central to India’s ambition of becoming a fully developed nation by 2047. He argued that India’s strengths in demography, democracy, digital public infrastructure and data generation uniquely equip it to emerge as one of the world’s leading AI powers in the 21st century.

He also stressed the importance of inclusive and multilingual AI, noting that intelligence must be accessible in every Indian language and tailored to farmers, small businesses, students and healthcare providers—not just large enterprises. AI, he said, should serve as a productivity multiplier across the informal and formal economy alike.