Meta $META announced an agreement on Wednesday to lease its first AI-enabled data center in India from Reliance Industries, with the facility to be built in Jamnagar, Gujarat, at 168 megawatts of capacity.
Reliance will build a 168-megawatt facility in Jamnagar, Gujarat, and deliver it within two years, with an option to expand
Chesnot/Getty Images
Meta $META announced an agreement on Wednesday to lease its first AI-enabled data center in India from Reliance Industries, with the facility to be built in Jamnagar, Gujarat, at 168 megawatts of capacity.
Under the deal, end-to-end responsibility for the facility falls to Reliance, covering everything from construction and design to power sourcing, connectivity, and day-to-day operations, the company said. Cooling at the facility will rely on desalinated seawater, and the campus will run on renewable power, with Meta bearing all associated energy and water costs. Construction is expected to wrap up in two years, after which capacity can be expanded, Reliance said.
"We're proud to be working with Reliance to build our first AI-enabled data center in India," Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. "This world-class facility in Jamnagar will help us scale our AI infrastructure globally while deepening our long-term investment in India's economy."
In a related announcement, Meta disclosed deals with two Indian clean energy firms totaling close to 1 gigawatt of new capacity: 837 megawatts of solar and wind generation from CleanMax, spanning projects in Rajasthan and Karnataka, and 88 megawatts from Fourth Partner Energy across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh. Both agreements support Meta's broader commitment to sourcing clean and renewable energy equivalent to all of its global operations, the company said.
The deal extends a relationship between Meta and Reliance that began with Meta's $5.7 billion investment in Jio Platforms, Reliance's telecom and digital services business, in 2020. Last year, according to Reuters, the two companies formed a joint venture aimed at building AI-powered platforms for Indian enterprises, with Reliance's Llama models serving as the underlying technology. The venture was seeded with a combined 8.55 billion rupees, with Reliance contributing 70 percent of that total and Meta the remaining 30 percent.
India has attracted a surge of data center investment from global technology companies. Microsoft $MSFT, Amazon $AMZN, Google $GOOGL, OpenAI, and Uber $UBER have each announced AI or cloud infrastructure investments in the country, according to TechCrunch. Government figures show the country's total data center capacity has grown roughly fourfold since 2020, climbing from about 375 megawatts to around 1.5 gigawatts in 2025, and analysts expect that buildout to accelerate further, with some projections placing capacity above 8 gigawatts before 2030.
Meta has been expanding its AI infrastructure spending, raising its projected capital expenditure for the full year to between $125 billion and $145 billion, with the company's CFO Susan Li citing anticipated rises in component costs and additional data center spending as drivers.
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