Meta joins the gold rush into Indian AI infrastructure
As every major tech company scrambles for the compute to train and run AI, Meta is making its first AI infrastructure move in India - and doing it with Reliance, the conglomerate that's fast becoming the country's go-to AI-infrastructure partner.
What's in the deal
Meta is leasing capacity at a new 168-megawatt data center Reliance is building in Jamnagar, Gujarat. A few specifics stand out:
- The facility will run on renewable energy and use desalinated seawater for cooling, with Meta covering the full cost of the energy and water its operations consume.
- Reliance says it will be ready within two years and can scale up over time, providing end-to-end services from design and construction through power, connectivity, and operations.
- Beyond local workloads, the site will feed Meta's global AI compute network, wiring India directly into the company's worldwide footprint.
- Separately, Meta said it has contracted nearly 1 gigawatt of new renewable capacity in India to support the build.
Why India, why now
India has turned into a magnet for AI infrastructure money. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, and Uber have all announced recent India investments, and Blackstone-backed AirTrunk just committed $30 billion to build 5 gigawatts of capacity there by 2030. Domestic players like Adani and TCS are piling in too. New Delhi has greased the wheels with tax incentives - including exemptions through 2047 for foreign cloud providers serving overseas customers from Indian data centers. The country's installed capacity has jumped from roughly 375 megawatts in 2020 to about 1.5 gigawatts in 2025, and could exceed 8 gigawatts by the end of the decade.
The bigger picture
This is really the next chapter in a slow-burn Meta-Reliance alliance that started with Meta's $5.7 billion Jio Platforms investment in 2020 and grew into a joint venture on enterprise AI. For Reliance, providing the whole stack signals an ambition to be a one-stop AI-infrastructure shop for global tech firms. The companies stayed quiet on the deal's value, the workloads involved, and whether more Meta investment is coming - but the direction of travel is unmistakable.