Meta and Reliance strike India's first big-tech AI data centre deal
Meta will lease a 168-megawatt AI data centre that Reliance is building in Jamnagar, deepening a partnership that began with a $5.7 billion Jio bet. Here is what it signals.
The News
Meta has signed its first AI data centre agreement in India, partnering with Reliance Industries to anchor capacity at a 168-megawatt facility in Jamnagar, Gujarat. Under the arrangement, Reliance will design, build and operate the site, while Meta leases compute capacity to feed its global AI workloads.
The facility is expected to be operational within two years and can be expanded over time. Reliance plans to run it on renewable power and cool it with desalinated seawater, an unusual engineering choice for a country where data centres typically compete with cities for both electricity and fresh water. Meta has committed to covering all energy and water costs tied to its share of the operation.
No headline deal value was disclosed. But the energy footprint hints at the scale: Meta has separately contracted nearly 1 gigawatt of new renewable capacity in India through agreements with CleanMax and Fourth Partner Energy to support the rollout.
Why It Matters
This is the clearest sign yet that the AI compute build-out is no longer a purely American or Chinese story. For years, hyperscalers parked their heaviest training and inference workloads in Northern Virginia, Ireland and Singapore. Putting a flagship facility in Gujarat marks a shift toward placing capacity closer to the users who will actually consume it.
The move also extends a relationship rather than starting one. Meta poured $5.7 billion into Jio Platforms in 2020, then launched a $100 million joint venture with Reliance in 2025 to build enterprise AI tools. Leasing physical compute is the logical next rung: first the user base, then the software layer, now the silicon that powers both.
The timing rhymes with the late-2010s cloud land grab, when Amazon and Microsoft raced to plant regional data centres across emerging markets to lock in the next billion users. India's own capacity tells the story. It stood at roughly 375 megawatts in 2020, reached around 1.5 gigawatts in 2025, and is projected to clear 8 gigawatts by the end of the decade. Meta is buying in mid-curve, not late.
Indian Angle
For Indian investors, the most interesting party here is not Meta but Reliance, which is quietly becoming a landlord to global AI. Owning the asset, the power contracts and the cooling infrastructure turns Jamnagar into a recurring annuity rather than a one-off construction win. Shareholders should watch whether Reliance discloses this as a distinct infrastructure segment, the way it eventually carved out Jio.
There is a policy tailwind too. The Indian government offers tax exemptions running through 2047 for foreign cloud providers on overseas services delivered from Indian data centres. That is a long runway, and it explains why Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, Adani, Tata Consultancy Services and Blackstone-backed AirTrunk are all expanding domestic capacity at once. The risk for policymakers is concentration: if a handful of conglomerates own most of the nation's compute, pricing power and data-localisation leverage shift to them.
For Indian developers and startups such as Sarvam and Krutrim, more local capacity should eventually mean lower latency and rupee-denominated billing instead of dollar-priced cloud bills that swing with the exchange rate. The catch is that leased hyperscaler capacity tends to serve the tenant first. Whether spare cycles trickle down to domestic founders will depend on how Reliance prices the rest of the building.
FAQ
When will the data centre go live?
Reliance expects the Jamnagar facility to be ready within two years of the agreement, with room to expand capacity beyond the initial 168 megawatts as demand grows.
How big is this compared to India's total capacity?
India hosted roughly 1.5 gigawatts of data centre capacity in 2025, up from about 375 megawatts in 2020. A single 168-megawatt site is therefore a meaningful addition, and projections point to more than 8 gigawatts nationally by 2030.
Is this Meta's first investment in Reliance?
No. Meta invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms in 2020 and set up a $100 million joint venture with Reliance in 2025 for enterprise AI. The data centre lease is the latest stage of that partnership.
Where can I read the original announcement?
The deal was first reported by TechCrunch, linked in the attribution paragraph below.
This story was reported by TechCrunch. Read the full original coverage at TechCrunch.