India’s Reliance Industries announced new partnerships with Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) to boost the company’s push into AI.
Billionaire Chairman of Reliance, Mukesh Ambani, made the announcements at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Friday.
Ambani also unveiled a new fully owned unit called Reliance Intelligence. He said the vision of the new unit is to house India’s AI infrastructure; house global partnerships; build AI services for India; and house the talent for AI.
Reliance Intelligence will build gigawatt-scale AI data centers, according to Ambani.
Under the partnership with Google, Reliance will use Google’s cloud and AI services to boost innovation in sectors like energy, retail, telecommunications, and financial services.
Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai said the companies will set up a dedicated cloud region in India, powered by clean energy provided by Reliance Industries and connected through Jio’s network.
Separately, Ambani also announced a new AI joint venture with Meta to combine open models and tools with Reliance’s execution in energy, retail, telecom, media and manufacturing and to deliver sovereign enterprise-ready AI for India.
Under the new joint venture, Reliance and Meta have pledged an initial investment of $100M to capitalize the unit in a ratio of 70% and 30% respectively, according to a report by CNBC.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.