Reliance Industries, India’s largest company by market capitalization, isn’t shying away from the AI craze that’s sweeping the tech world.
At the company’s 47th annual general meeting on Thursday, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani and other executives mentioned AI nearly 30 times over a two-hour period, detailing plans to integrate the technology across Reliance’s vast business empire, which spans telecommunications, retail and energy.
Reliance announced plans to build large AI-enabled data centers in Jamnagar, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, that would run on the company’s green energy resources. Ambani claimed these facilities could lower the cost of AI inference in India, making AI applications more affordable. The company did not provide details about the feasibility or timeline for achieving this goal.
Reliance’s telecom arm, Jio, is developing a “comprehensive” AI suite called “Jio Brain” to accelerate AI adoption across its and other Reliance companies. The company has partnered with the Jio Institute to develop an AI program aimed at nurturing the next generation of AI talent in India.
India, which has lagged far behind in the global AI race, has seen a flurry of activity over the past year, with conglomerates such as Reliance and the Tata Group (both of which have partnerships with Nvidia) and a slew of startups pushing ahead with the development of AI apps and infrastructure.
Ambani said Reliance will offer up to 100GB of free cloud storage to Jio users through its Jio AI-Cloud service, scheduled to launch around Diwali in October. During the presentation, Reliance demoed its call recording and transcription service, JioPhonecall AI, and introduced Jio TvOS, an operating system for set-top boxes with an AI voice assistant.
The company added Ambani’s three children to its board of directors last year but notably failed to provide any updates on the long-awaited initial public offerings of India’s largest telecommunications operator Jio and India’s largest retail chain Reliance Retail.
“Five years ago, the RIL chairman had said he would IPO his telecom and retail businesses within five years, so the market is expecting an update on this,” said analysts at Bank of America.
Ambani said the company expects Jio and retail sales and EBITDA to double over the next three to four years. Brokerage Jefferies said last month that Reliance could take Jio public next year, valuing it at more than $110 billion.
Jio raised about $20 billion in 2020 from investors including Meta, Google, Mubadala, ADIA and KKR. The fundraise valued the Reliance subsidiary at $65 billion. Reliance Retail, which raised $7 billion from outside investors in 2020, raised about $1.85 billion last year at a valuation of $100 billion.
