India might not be participating in the AI revolution through building LLMs and AI models, but it seems to be looking to push at the hardware side of things.
Reliance is planning to set up the world’s largest datacenter in Jamnagar in Gujarat. The company is reportedly in the process of purchasing AI chips from NVIDIA to power the datacenter. The datacenter will be Reliance’s first major move towards the rapidly-developing AI space.
Back in October 2024, Reliance and Nvidia had announced a joint attempt in building AI infrastructure in India during a chat session at the Nvidia AI Summit. Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang had then had a public conversation, which showed much camaraderie between the duo, and also an indication to do business together. NVIDIA had said that it will supply its Blackwell AI processors for a one-gigawatt data center that Reliance is building.
This wasn’t the first time that Reliance and NVIDIA had looked to collaborate. In 2023, Reliance had announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to build AI supercomputers in India. The two companies had also said they would collaborate to develop India’s own foundation large language model (LLM) along the lines of ChatGPT, which would be trained on India’s diverse languages and tailored for Indian use-cases. The companies had said they would work to build an AI infrastructure that is an order of magnitude more powerful than the fastest supercomputer available in India today.
While nothing much seems to have emerged from Reliance’s plans to build an LLM in partnership with NVIDIA, it appears that the hardware aspects of the partnership seem to be coming to fruition. Reliance has announced it will build the world’s largest datacenter in Jamnagar, and use NVIDIA’s chips to power it. There has been much activity in the space globally over the last few months. Microsoft had recently announced that it would spend $80 billion to build AI infrastructure this year, and just two days ago, OpenAI had said that it had received a staggering $500 billion commitment to build its datacenters. For context, $500 billion is more than double Reliance’s entire market cap of $200 billion, but with Reliance looking to build its own AI data centers — and the world’s biggest datacenter at that — India might end up meaningfully throwing its hat in the AI ring.