There is a moment in a country's story when big ambitions stop being background noise and start looking like a real plan. India may have just reached one of those moments.
In the span of a few days in February 2026, two of India's most powerful business groups, Adani and Reliance stood up at a global AI summit in New Delhi and together pledged over $210 billion to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in the country. The numbers are staggering. But the real question is not how large these commitments are. It is whether India can actually pull this off.
What Adani is Promising?
The Adani Group announced on February 17 that it will invest $100 billion by 2035 to build massive, renewable-energy-powered data centres designed to handle the most demanding AI tasks. These are not ordinary server rooms. We are talking about facilities that can process enormous amounts of data simultaneously and the kind of computing muscle that trains AI systems and runs them at scale.
Adani's chairman Gautam Adani framed this in terms that go beyond business, "Nations that master the symmetry between energy and compute will shape the next decade. India is uniquely positioned to lead." That is a grand claim. But the plan underneath it has some concrete legs.
The company already has an existing data centre platform and has struck partnerships with Google to build India's largest data centre campus in Visakhapatnam and with Microsoft for facilities in Hyderabad and Pune. Adani is also partnering with Flipkart to build a second AI-focused data centre. Crucially, this $100 billion direct investment is expected to pull in an additional $150 billion across server manufacturing, cloud services, and related industries by projecting a $250 billion AI ecosystem in India over the decade.
The green energy piece is central to Adani's argument. Running AI data centres requires enormous amounts of electricity, and doing it with renewable power is both a moral and commercial advantage. The group's solar project in Khavda, Gujarat, already has over 10 gigawatts of operational capacity, and Adani plans to spend another $55 billion expanding that portfolio, including what could be one of the world's largest battery storage systems.
The group also wants to reserve a portion of its computing capacity for Indian startups, research institutions, and young technology entrepreneurs, essentially trying to ensure that this infrastructure does not just serve global tech giants but seeds a homegrown innovation economy.
What Ambani Is Promising?
Two days later, Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries stood at the same summit and made his own declaration. Reliance and its telecom arm, Jio, will invest $110 billion over seven years to build AI infrastructure in India, with a focus on three things - gigawatt-scale AI data centres in Jamnagar in Gujarat, a nationwide network of smaller computing nodes integrated with Jio's telecom network, and AI services built specifically for Indian languages and Indian realities.
Ambani's pitch draws directly on what Jio did to mobile data in India. When Jio launched in 2016, it disrupted the market by slashing data prices so dramatically that India went from one of the most expensive data markets to one of the cheapest in the world. "Jio connected India to the Internet Era and it will now connect India to the Intelligence Era. India cannot afford to rent intelligence. Therefore, we will reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as we did in the case of data," Ambani said.
He also pointed to AI applications already being deployed through Jio, such as tools for farmers, adaptive learning for students in 22 languages, AI-powered medical guidance, and voice-first assistants for education and government services. The idea is that AI should not be a luxury available to the urban, English-speaking professional class but something that reaches every part of the country.
Why This Matters
Together, these announcements paint a picture of India trying to move from being a country that consumes technology built elsewhere to one that builds, owns, and exports it. The timing is deliberate. India recently jumped to third place by overtaking South Korea and Japan in a global ranking of AI competitiveness by Stanford University researchers. The government is offering tax breaks to foreign tech firms operating from Indian data centres, and companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are all expanding in the country.
But there is a gap between announcement and delivery, and it would be simple to ignore it. Execution and monetisation remain key risks, as one investment analyst pointed out. These investments are spread across seven to ten years, and a lot can change in technology, in global trade, in regulation, and in the political economy of AI itself. The $100 or $110 billion figures are targets, not cheques already written.
The Bigger Picture
What is genuinely significant here is not just the money. It is the shift in how India's largest companies are thinking about where value will be created in the next decade. Both Adani and Ambani are making a bet that the ability to process and generate intelligence at scale, at low cost, on home soil will be as fundamental as electricity or connectivity. That is not a minor insight.
The world is already dividing into those who own AI infrastructure and those who rely on it. India, with its massive data advantage, large engineering talent base, and now billions committed to physical infrastructure, is making a serious play for the first category.
Whether it succeeds will depend not just on capital, but on whether the government keeps policy clear, whether the talent supply keeps pace with the ambition, and whether these billions of dollars of commitment actually translate into functioning facilities that drive real economic activity. The pledges have been made. Now comes the harder part.
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