Meta Bets on India: 168 MW AI Data Center Partnership With Reliance Signals a New Frontier
Meta signed its first AI data center deal in India with Reliance Industries, announcing a 168-megawatt facility in Jamnagar, Gujarat powered entirely by renewable energy and cooled with desalinated seawater. The agreement builds on Meta's $5.7 billion Jio investment and arrives as India's data center market races toward 8 gigawatts of capacity by 2030, intensifying competition with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.
India just became Mark Zuckerberg’s next major infrastructure bet. On June 10, Meta announced it had signed its first AI data center agreement in India, partnering with Reliance Industries on a 168-megawatt facility in Jamnagar, Gujarat — a coastal city already home to Reliance’s sprawling industrial complex and one of the world’s largest oil refineries.
The deal deepens a strategic relationship that began in 2020 when Meta invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms, Reliance’s digital arm. Six years later, that investment has evolved from a bet on India’s consumer internet market into a full-scale play for the infrastructure layer powering the country’s AI transformation.
The Facility: Scale, Sustainability, and Reliance’s Full Stack
The Jamnagar data center will operate at 168 megawatts of IT load — equivalent in scale to many hyperscale facilities in the United States or Europe. Reliance will provide what the companies described as an end-to-end service: design, construction, renewable power sourcing, connectivity, and ongoing operations. Meta’s role is to fund and deploy its AI computing workloads within the facility.
The sustainability commitments are unusually specific. Meta will cover the entire cost of energy and water required to run the facility. Cooling will rely on desalinated seawater rather than freshwater resources — an important consideration in a water-stressed region. The company contracted nearly one gigawatt of new renewable energy capacity through separate agreements with CleanMax and Fourth Partner Energy, two of India’s largest clean power developers, to underpin the facility’s operations.
The data center can be expanded over time as demand grows, with a target completion window of approximately two years — meaning the facility should be operational by mid-2028.
India’s Infrastructure Race
The timing reflects the competitive intensity of India’s data center market. Between 2020 and 2025, the country’s total data center capacity roughly quadrupled — from 375 megawatts to approximately 1.5 gigawatts. Industry analysts project that figure will exceed 8 gigawatts by 2030, a compounded growth rate that has every major hyperscaler scrambling for capacity.
Microsoft has committed more than $3 billion to data center development in India. Amazon Web Services announced a $12.7 billion investment plan. Google’s Alphabet has pledged several billion more. OpenAI has been evaluating locations for its first owned infrastructure in the country. The competition for suitable land, power connections, and technical talent has made early movers like Reliance increasingly valuable as partners — companies that understand Indian regulatory environments, have relationships with state power utilities, and can deliver construction at a pace that matches demand.
For Reliance, the Meta deal represents a significant expansion of its ambitions beyond its core oil, telecom, and retail businesses. The conglomerate has positioned itself explicitly as a full-service provider to hyperscalers entering India. That includes not just the physical real estate and construction, but the power procurement, water infrastructure, and network connectivity that large AI training and inference workloads require.
A Relationship That Has Been Building
The Meta-Reliance partnership traces a clear line of escalating commitment. The 2020 Jio investment was the opening move — a financial stake that gave Meta preferred access to India’s 400-million-strong Jio subscriber base and a seat at the table as Jio built out its 5G network. That deal also presaged the broader consolidation of India’s telecom and digital infrastructure markets.
Last year, the two companies launched a $100 million joint venture focused specifically on enterprise AI solutions for Indian and international markets. That venture gave Reliance engineers direct exposure to Meta’s AI development practices and gave Meta a closer look at the operational realities of deploying technology in India at scale.
The new data center agreement is the natural third chapter: moving from minority investment, to joint AI product development, to core infrastructure. Meta is now not just a shareholder in Jio but a paying tenant in Reliance’s next-generation physical infrastructure.
What Meta Gets From India
India is simultaneously one of Meta’s largest user bases and one of its fastest-growing advertising markets. WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook collectively reach hundreds of millions of Indians, and the company is actively building AI features — including WhatsApp’s business automation tools and Meta AI’s regional language capabilities — that require low-latency compute access closer to end users.
Having owned or leased capacity in India addresses two strategic imperatives. First, it reduces latency for real-time AI inference serving Indian users — a meaningful quality improvement for voice-based features and conversational AI applications. Second, it gives Meta an alternative to routing all Indian user data through U.S. or European infrastructure, a growing regulatory concern as India moves toward stricter data localization requirements.
The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement, the specific AI workloads that will run from Jamnagar, or whether Meta plans to announce additional Indian data center investments. The silence on financial terms is standard for infrastructure deals of this type, but the scale — 168 megawatts, nearly 1 gigawatt of renewable energy contracted — speaks to commitment that goes well beyond a trial run.
The Broader Signal
Meta’s Jamnagar deal is the latest data point in a pattern that has become impossible to ignore: AI infrastructure spending is becoming genuinely global. For years, the compute build-out was concentrated in the United States and, to a lesser degree, Europe. The combination of data localization pressure, local latency requirements, and the sheer scale of emerging market user bases is now forcing every major AI company to think about where their compute actually lives.
India, with its combination of technical talent, favorable government policy toward foreign technology investment, and a growing domestic AI industry of its own, has become the clearest first destination. The question is no longer whether the hyperscalers will invest in India — they all have — but who controls the infrastructure underneath them. Reliance, with its unmatched industrial footprint, national power relationships, and now a proven track record as a hyperscale partner, appears to be positioning itself as the answer to that question.