How Reliance Jio plans to disrupt India's AI market
30 Dec 2024

Jio Platforms has teamed up with tech giant NVIDIA, to create affordable artificial intelligence (AI) services and applications in India.

The partnership will bring these solutions through GPU-as-a-service at competitive rates.

As part of this effort, Jio is building a massive AI data center in Jamnagar for internal and commercial purposes.

The facility will be powered by green energy to keep operational costs low and make AI accessible at competitive rates for India's price-sensitive market.

Jio's strategy to make AI affordable and accessible
Strategic approach

Speaking to the Economic Times about the company's strategy to make AI affordable and accessible, a senior executive from Jio Platforms said the approach would involve three key elements: the device, data on cloud, and high-speed broadband networks.

"Jio is working on all these so that every individual can have a personal AI agency based on his needs and likes," the executive said.

This is part of Jio's broader plan to revolutionize next-generation technologies.

Jio and NVIDIA's AI use cases span multiple sectors
Diverse applications

Jio and NVIDIA are looking at AI use cases in retail, healthcare, agriculture, and education.

The high-end Blackwell GPUs from NVIDIA are being utilized for Reliance Industries's internal use and for creating Jio-branded products and services based on large language models (LLMs).

Apart from the India AI Mission, Jio is also eyeing monetization opportunities with Jio Brain - an enterprise AI suite.

Jio's participation in India's AI mission
Government initiative

The India AI Mission is a government effort to provide GPUs at a subsidized price.

"Assuming if the price is ₹25 per GPU hour, the government will subsidize ₹5-10 out of that," the executive explained.

The project has a ₹10,300 crore budget to enable responsible AI innovation in India. Half of this has been set aside for providing AI compute hardware by empaneling cloud providers, data center companies.

Jio's AI data center and future expansion plans
Expansion plans

Jio is building a 1 GW AI data center in Jamnagar for in-house use and providing GPU-as-a-service to commercial projects such as the India AI Mission.

The company intends to deploy more AI inferencing facilities across India as usage grows. This will bring AI closer to the edge, the executive said.

The high cost of AI infrastructure and running LLMs will be balanced by green energy, which will contribute significantly to lowering operational costs going forward.

Jio Brain's role in Reliance's corporate functions
AI integration

Reliance is weaving AI into its corporate functions across different companies with the Jio Brain suite.

These functions range from oil and gas refinery operations to telecom network management and retail store security.

"We are creating end-to-end workflows with real-time data, which helps us in smarter and quicker decision making," said the executive.

Once perfected, Reliance plans to offer Jio Brain as a platform to other enterprises too.