META PLANTS ITS FIRST AI DATA CENTER FLAG IN INDIA AND RELIANCE INDUSTRIES GETS THE ENTIRE CONTRACT Meta is going to India for computing power, and it is bringing Reliance Industries along for the entire ride. The partnership announced June 10 will produce a 168-megawatt AI-enabled data center in Jamnagar, Gujarat, powered by renewable energy and cooled with desalinated seawater. Reliance is handling everything: design, construction, power, connectivity, and ongoing operations. Meta will pay for the full cost of energy and water its operations require. The deal deepens a relationship that started in 2020, when Meta invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms, Reliance’s digital services arm. Since then, the two companies expanded into enterprise AI solutions and now the physical infrastructure that underpins next-generation AI systems. India is becoming one of the most contested pieces of real estate in global AI infrastructure. Microsoft is investing $17.5 billion there through 2029. Amazon committed $35 billion by 2030. OpenAI has a 100-megawatt facility through Tata. Blackstone-backed AirTrunk just pledged $30 billion to build five gigawatts of data center capacity in the country by 2030. The Indian government is helping this along with tax exemptions through 2047 for foreign cloud providers on services sold overseas, as long as those workloads run from Indian data centers. The rush is real. India’s installed data center capacity has risen from about 375 megawatts in 2020 to around 1.5 gigawatts in 2025. Industry estimates project that figure will grow more than fivefold to over 8 gigawatts by the end of the decade. Every major tech company is now racing to secure a piece of that buildout before the land and the contracts are gone. Keywords: Meta India data center, Reliance Industries Meta AI, Meta AI infrastructure India, Jamnagar data center