India’s top telco tackles AI with $110 billion build plan and proven fast market dominance playbook
The Register
February 20, 2026
AI-Generated Deep Dive Summary
India’s leading telecom giant, Reliance Jio, has unveiled plans to invest $110 billion over seven years in AI infrastructure, signaling its ambition to revolutionize artificial intelligence services in the country. The company, which already dominates India’s mobile market with 514 million subscribers and 51% market share, aims to replicate its success in affordability and scale by building world-class data centers for AI workloads. Jio’s chairman, Mukesh Ambani, emphasized that this is a long-term strategic investment focused on creating economic value and ensuring India’s technological resilience. He highlighted that the primary challenge in AI today is not talent or innovation but the high cost of compute power, which Jio plans to address through its new infrastructure.
Jio’s track record of rapid growth in telecom serves as a blueprint for its AI strategy. Since launching in 2016, Jio achieved 100 million subscribers within six months by offering ultra-cheap, unlimited data plans and affordable smartphones, some priced at just $12. The company later solidified its leadership with the introduction of a $27 smartphone developed with Google, a swift 5G rollout, and bundled streaming services. Now, Jio aims to apply this same model of affordability and scale to AI by building multiple gigawatts of data center capacity. Ambani stressed that India cannot afford to rely on foreign AI solutions, so the company is determined to reduce the cost of intelligence as drastically as it did for mobile data.
The move has significant implications for India’s AI ecosystem. While the country lacks robust AI infrastructure and本土 tech giants in the field, Jio’s expertise in
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Originally published on The Register on 2/20/2026