India AI Summit: Reliance Unveils Rs 10 Lakh Cr Plan For 7 Yrs, Cut AI Cost ‘Dramatically’; Is This Jio 2.0?

India AI Summit: Jio, along with Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), plans to invest around Rs 10 lakh crore in India over the next seven years, Chairman Mukesh Ambani announced on Thursday, February 19, at the India AI Impact Summit 2026. He also outlined the company's vision to drastically reduce the cost of artificial intelligence services in the country, a move that echoes Reliance's data price disruption during the launch of Jio in 2016-17.

"This is not speculative investment. It is not for chasing valuation. This is patient, disciplined nation-building capital," said Mukesh Ambani on Thursday.

RIL To Dramatically Reduce Cost of AI

In 2016, Reliance launched Jio in an aggressive attempt to capture the telecom market with its competitive data prices. Cut to 2026, the conglomerate has announced its plans to dramatically reduce the cost of AI with Jio.

"Jio connected India to the internet era. Jio will now connect India to the intelligence era. We will deliver intelligence to every citizen, every sector of the economy, and every facet of social development and every service of government. Jio will do so with the same reliability, quality, scale, and extreme affordability that transformed connectivity. India cannot afford to rent intelligence. Therefore, we will reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as we did the cost of data," said Ambani at AI Summit.

Jio With Reliance To Invest 10 Lakh Crores

The retail-to-telecom titan has also planned to invest around 10 lakh crores over the next seven years starting from 2026. The biggest constraint in AI is not scarcity of talent, but high cost of compute, he said. "Jio Intelligence will build India's sovereign compute infrastructure." This includes gigawatt-scale data centre

Reliance To Boost India's AI Infrastructure

With its company, Jio Intelligence, Reliance has planned to contribute in boosting the country's sovereign compute infrastructure through three initiatives, development of gigawatt-scale data centres, using green energy advantage, and focus on edge compute layer.

"We already started construction on multi-gigawatt AI-ready data centres at Jamnagar. Over 120 megawatts will come online in the second half of 2026 this year and a clear path to gigawatt-scale compute for training and large scale inference. Our green energy advantage. We have an in-house energy advantage with up to 10 gigawatts of ready green power surplus anchored by solar in both Kutch and Andhra Pradesh. A nationwide edge compute, an edge compute layer deeply integrated with Jio's network will make intelligence responsive, low latency, and affordable close to where Indians live, learn, and work," added Ambani.