JAMNAGAR, India—The city better known for the world’s largest oil refinery complex is about to become part of the AI supply chain. Meta Platforms said June 10 it will lease a 168-megawatt data center that Reliance Industries will build in Jamnagar, Gujarat, the company’s first dedicated data-center capacity in India.
The facility, to be delivered within two years, will be powered by renewable energy and cooled with desalinated seawater drawn from the nearby coast, according to the companies. Meta will pay the full cost of the energy and water the campus consumes. Reliance will provide everything else: design, construction, utilities, renewable-power supply, network connectivity and ongoing operations, a single-window arrangement the conglomerate is offering to hyperscale customers.
The deal extends a partnership that began in 2020, when Meta invested $5.7 billion in Reliance’s Jio Platforms for a 9.98% stake. The two companies have since built a joint venture to bring Meta’s open-source AI models to Indian developers and enterprises. The data center, Meta said, is the next chapter, moving the relationship from software and connectivity into physical infrastructure.
Jamnagar is an unusual location for a data center. The city sits on the Gulf of Kutch in western Gujarat, far from the software hubs of Bengaluru and Hyderabad. But it has what AI infrastructure needs most: land, power and water. Reliance’s refinery complex nearby anchors a vast industrial ecosystem with grid connections and utilities, and the region has access to submarine cable landing stations on India’s west coast. The city is also close to Project Waterworth, the subsea cable system Meta is building that will link India with the rest of its global network.
The data center will serve Meta’s global infrastructure, not just its Indian users, the company said, supporting the artificial-intelligence workloads that have become the center of its product strategy. Meta has been building out AI compute capacity worldwide, and India, with more than a billion users of its apps, is both a market and a source of engineering talent.
Alongside the data center, Meta announced nearly a gigawatt of new renewable energy contracts in India. CleanMax will build 837 megawatts of solar and wind projects in Rajasthan and Karnataka, bringing its cumulative capacity with Meta to more than 900 megawatts, while Fourth Partner Energy will add 88 megawatts across four states. The contracts support Meta’s goal of matching all its electricity consumption with clean energy.
The deal is a win for Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, who has committed his conglomerate to invest $110 billion in AI-related infrastructure over seven years. Ambani has said India cannot afford to rent intelligence from abroad, and has been pushing to build the country’s own computing and energy backbone. The Meta agreement gives Reliance a flagship customer for the data-center business it is building from scratch.
India’s data-center market is at an inflection. The country has roughly 1.4 gigawatts of commissioned capacity, and analysts expect that to grow toward 10 gigawatts over the next several years as global hyperscalers and Indian conglomerates commit an estimated $270 billion to the sector. Government support includes a 20-year tax holiday for cloud companies, and data-localization rules push foreign firms to keep Indian users’ data inside the country.
The economics of the Jamnagar site lean on geography. Desalinated seawater cooling eliminates the need for scarce freshwater, and Gujarat’s renewable resources, including some of India’s best solar irradiance, keep power costs low. Reliance has said the campus is designed to expand beyond the initial 168 megawatts, and industry executives expect Meta’s lease to be followed by others.
The deal also carries a political dimension. Ambani’s close ties to the Indian government have made Reliance the preferred partner for global technology companies seeking to do business in the country, a position that has drawn scrutiny from rivals and regulators. Meta’s deepening dependence on a single Indian partner raises questions about concentration, though the company has said it will continue working with other providers.
For Meta, the immediate effect is capacity. The company has said it needs far more compute than it owns, and leasing from Reliance lets it expand without the years-long process of building and powering its own campuses. The renewable-energy contracts, meanwhile, address the criticism that AI data centers are a growing source of emissions.
The announcement was made jointly on June 10, with both companies’ chief executives on the record. Zuckerberg described the facility as part of Meta’s global AI scaling; Ambani called it a transformative moment for India’s digital infrastructure. Whatever the rhetoric, the deal puts a number on the direction of travel: the world’s biggest social-media company is betting that one of the world’s biggest conglomerates can build its AI future on the shores of the Gulf of Kutch.
