Feb 19 (Reuters) - India's Reliance Industries and telecoms arm Jio will invest $109.8 billion over the next seven years to build artificial intelligence and data infrastructure, its billionaire chairman Mukesh Ambani said on Thursday.
Speaking at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Ambani said the investment would be directed toward long-term "nation-building" capital, including sovereign AI computing capacity, as a shortage and the high cost of computing power remain the biggest constraints on domestic AI development.
India's first major artificial intelligence summit this week has drawn senior executives from global technology firms.
Jio is constructing multi-gigawatt, AI-ready data centres at Jamnagar, and is set to have over 120 megawatts of capacity online in the second half of this year, Ambani said.
The telecommunications company also plans to build AI-ready data centres powered by renewable energy, he said.
Separately, Adani Enterprises on Tuesday also said it will invest $100 billion to build renewable-powered AI-ready data centres by 2035.
Indian companies are increasing AI investment, committing billions of dollars to data centres, computing infrastructure and related services to meet rising demand.
Earlier on Thursday, U.S. AI developer OpenAI said it would become the first customer of a data centre operated by Tata Consultancy Services.
($1 = 91.0870 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Chandini Monnappa and Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Christopher Cushing)
