New Delhi: On Thursday, Mukesh D Ambani used his keynote at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 to frame artificial intelligence as the next mass-scale shift
after mobile data.
The talk leaned heavily on one idea: AI is moving from a “cool demo” phase to basic infrastructure that everyday Indians will notice in shops, schools, clinics, and farms.
Ambani’s three big announcements at the summit
Ambani opened by saying, “Jio connected India to the Internet Era. Jio will now connect India to the Intelligence Era.” He added, “We will deliver intelligence to every citizen, every sector of the economy, every facet of social development, and every service of government.”
He also pushed the affordability argument, saying, “India cannot afford to rent intelligence. Therefore, we will reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as we did the cost of data.”
The second announcement was the headline number. “Jio, together with Reliance, will invest ₹10 lakh crores over the next seven years starting this year.”
Compute is the bottleneck, Reliance is betting on infrastructure
Ambani called out the constraint bluntly. “The biggest constraint in AI today is not talent or imagination. It is scarcity and high cost of compute.”
His third announcement was a “sovereign compute infrastructure” plan built on three initiatives:
- “Gigawatt-Scale Data Centres” with construction underway at Jamnagar, with “Over 120 MW” expected online in the second half of 2026
- “Our Green Energy Advantage” with “up to 10 GW” of ready green-power surplus
- “A Nationwide Edge Compute” layer tied to Jio’s network so “intelligence will live at the edge.”
Ambani’s closer was a wider pitch for cooperation, saying “AI works its magic through sharing, not hoarding” and repeating the line, “One Earth, One Family, and One Future.”
