Meta announced Tuesday that it has signed an agreement with Reliance Industries to lease its first artificial intelligence data center in India, according to a statement released through the company’s newsroom and comments from Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Meta, and Mukesh D. Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries Limited.

The plant will be built in Jamnagar, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Under the agreement, Reliance will construct the facility while Meta leases the computing capacity inside it. The first phase is expected to operate at 168 megawatts of power, with room for future expansion.

Here is the simplest way to understand the arrangement. Meta operates platforms used by billions of people worldwide, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and requires vast computing power to run its growing artificial intelligence systems. Rather than building its own facility from the ground up in India, Meta will pay Reliance to build and operate the infrastructure while leasing the computing resources it needs.

India is central to the strategy. It is one of Meta’s largest and fastest-growing markets, and the company said locating computing power within the country will allow AI products and services to run faster for local users. Zuckerberg said the Jamnagar facility will strengthen Meta’s global AI infrastructure while deepening its long-term investment in India.

The partnership builds on an existing relationship. In 2020, Meta invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms, Reliance’s telecommunications and digital subsidiary, in a move aimed at expanding internet access and helping small businesses across India. The companies later worked together to make Meta’s open-source AI models available to Indian businesses and developers. The new data center extends that partnership into the physical infrastructure powering artificial intelligence.

The facility has been designed around two of the largest operating costs in data centers: energy and water. Reliance is developing what it describes as one of the world’s largest data center campuses in Jamnagar, with access to the significant power resources required for AI computing. The site will run on renewable energy and use desalinated seawater for cooling rather than freshwater supplies. Meta said it will cover the full cost of the energy and water needed to operate the center.

Ambani described the agreement as a milestone for India’s digital infrastructure, saying that building the country’s first custom-designed data center for a technology company of Meta’s scale demonstrates India’s readiness to play a leading role in the global AI economy.

Meta also announced a major clean-energy expansion in India. The company said it has contracted nearly 1 gigawatt of new solar and wind generation through two energy providers.

CleanMax will supply 837 megawatts from new projects in Rajasthan and Karnataka, bringing Meta’s total announced capacity with the company to more than 900 megawatts. Fourth Partner Energy will provide an additional 88 megawatts from projects across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh.

The business implications are significant. AI data centers have become one of the largest areas of spending across the global technology sector, influencing employment, construction activity, power demand, and local infrastructure investment. By having Reliance build and operate the facility, India retains ownership of the underlying infrastructure while keeping related energy and water spending within the country.

For Reliance, the agreement helps transform Jamnagar—long known as a major refining and energy hub—into a destination for AI and cloud-computing customers. The company has signaled its intention to host AI infrastructure for outside firms, and securing a customer the size of Meta represents a major validation of that strategy.

The deal also highlights a broader trend across the technology industry as major American companies race to secure computing capacity around the world rather than relying solely on domestic infrastructure.

For users in India, the immediate goal is straightforward: faster AI services and digital applications powered by servers located closer to where they live and work.

Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the lease agreement or provided a firm timeline for when the Jamnagar facility will begin operations.

JBizNews Desk — Asia

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