Meta signs first AI data center deal in India

Meta has signed its first AI data center infrastructure deal in India with Reliance Industries, leasing capacity at a planned 168-megawatt facility in Jamnagar in the western state of Gujarat. The partnership, reported by TechCrunch, ties Meta’s fast-growing AI compute demand to a local operator that will design, build, power and run the site end-to-end. Reliance says the facility will be ready within two years and can be expanded over time.

The agreement lands as India tries to turn itself into a default location for cloud and AI workloads rather than just a market for apps. TechCrunch notes that the Indian government offers incentives including tax exemptions through 2047 for foreign cloud providers on services sold overseas if the workloads run from Indian data centers. Government figures cited in the report show installed Indian data center capacity rising from roughly 375 megawatts in 2020 to about 1.5 gigawatts in 2025, with industry projections pointing higher by the end of the decade.

For Meta, the attraction is not only capacity but inputs. Reliance says the Jamnagar site will be powered by renewable energy and cooled using desalinated seawater, and Meta will cover the full cost of the energy and water it consumes. That structure pushes operating costs onto the customer rather than into a bundled “cloud” price, and it makes the bottlenecks—power procurement, water and cooling—explicit line items instead of someone else’s headache. Meta has also contracted close to 1 gigawatt of new renewable energy capacity in India through agreements with CleanMax and Fourth Partner Energy, according to the same report.

The deal also extends an existing corporate relationship. Meta previously made a multibillion-dollar investment in Reliance’s Jio Platforms, and the companies launched a $100 million joint venture last year to build enterprise AI solutions for India and overseas customers, TechCrunch reports. The data center lease deepens the interdependence: Reliance gains a marquee tenant for a new build, while Meta gets a local partner with permitting, construction and grid relationships in a country where infrastructure projects often live or die on administrative throughput.

Other US tech firms are also putting chips on India as a compute base, with TechCrunch listing Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI and Uber among those investing in AI and cloud infrastructure there. Yet Meta and Reliance did not disclose the value of the agreement, what specific AI workloads will run in Jamnagar, or whether Meta plans additional Indian sites.

Reliance is building a 168-megawatt data center in Jamnagar. Meta is leasing capacity and paying for the energy and water.