Meta has entered India's booming AI infrastructure market with its first data center partnership in the country, teaming up with Reliance Industries on a 168-megawatt facility in Jamnagar, Gujarat. The Wednesday announcement deepens a relationship that began with Meta's $5.7 billion stake in Reliance's Jio Platforms back in 2020 and grew into a $100 million joint venture last year focused on enterprise AI tools for Indian and overseas customers. The new facility will handle AI workloads, putting Meta alongside a growing list of global tech giants betting big on India as a destination for compute-heavy infrastructure.
The deal lands in the middle of a stampede into Indian data centers. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, and Uber have all unveiled AI and cloud investments in recent months, while Blackstone-backed AirTrunk said earlier this week it would pour $30 billion into building 5 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2030. Indian conglomerates Adani and Tata Consultancy Services are also racing to expand their footprints. The government has fueled the frenzy with policy sweeteners, including tax exemptions running through 2047 for foreign cloud providers running workloads on Indian soil for overseas clients.
India's installed data center capacity has climbed from roughly 375 megawatts in 2020 to about 1.5 gigawatts in 2025, according to government figures, and industry projections suggest it could balloon past 8 gigawatts by the end of the decade. That growth is being driven by surging cloud adoption, the training and deployment of AI models, and tightening requirements to process data locally. The Meta-Reliance project in Jamnagar is set to become one of the more significant early anchors of that expansion, given Reliance's existing footprint in the region through its refining and energy operations.
While the companies haven't disclosed the financial terms or timeline for the 168-megawatt buildout, the agreement signals how Meta is pursuing infrastructure partnerships rather than going it alone in markets where local players bring land, power, and regulatory know-how. For Reliance, the deal extends a partnership that has already spanned messaging, commerce, and enterprise software into the physical infrastructure that powers frontier AI systems — a bet that India will be as critical to the next era of AI compute as it has been to the mobile internet boom.