In Short:
Indian tech entrepreneurs, led by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio, are shaking up the AI market, competing with global giants. Jio promises AI innovations and free cloud storage, challenging established services like Google One and iCloud. They plan to build a large, eco-friendly data center and collect extensive language data from users, making AI training more efficient. This shift could benefit India’s IT landscape significantly.
The landscape of technology in India is undergoing a significant transformation, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence (AI). Indian tech entrepreneurs are challenging the dominance of global giants, and Reliance Jio, the country’s largest telecom company led by tycoon Mukesh Ambani, is poised to be at the forefront of this disruption. Recently, Ambani announced a series of AI offerings that could establish formidable competition for established players in the market.
Transformative AI Vision
During a recent statement, Mukesh Ambani emphasized that AI represents a transformative milestone in human evolution. He articulated that the ongoing technological evolution within Reliance Jio would propel the company into a new realm of hyper-growth, significantly increasing its overall value in the coming years. Reliance Jio has already made waves in India’s telecommunications and over-the-top (OTT) services markets by delivering attractively priced offerings. However, industry experts warn that pricing strategies alone may not suffice in the AI sector, highlighting the importance of the timing and implementation of Jio’s AI ambitions.
Free Cloud Storage Challenge
The recent introduction of a 100GB free cloud storage offer by Reliance Jio has the potential to disrupt the dominance of Google One and Apple’s iCloud among users of Android and Apple devices in India. According to experts, existing competitors like Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneDrive have not been able to match this proposition. This competitive landscape may prompt existing players to reassess their pricing structures, particularly as Google One offers 100GB for ₹130 and iCloud provides 50GB at ₹75.
Neil Shah, founding partner of Counterpoint Research, pointed out, “Jio has introduced a highly attractive option for average smartphone users in India, who frequently struggle with storage capabilities due to the costs associated with paid services.” However, he added, “Bundling products and services with operating system ecosystems remains a significant challenge.” For instance, applications like WhatsApp largely rely on iCloud and Google One for data backup since the majority of smartphones in India operate on either Android or iOS. For Jio to succeed, establishing partnerships with application providers to unlink them from existing ecosystems will be essential.
Furthermore, the adoption of Jio Cloud presents an opportunity for the company to collect vast amounts of user data, which is critical for training its AI models.
Innovative Data Collection
In 2022, Google invested heavily in project Vaani, aimed at gathering speech data from underrepresented Indian languages to train Indic AI models. To date, this initiative has amassed over 14,000 hours of speech data from 80,000 speakers across 58 languages. Similarly, the startup Karya has created job opportunities for numerous rural workers to gather speech data. Reliance Jio intends to achieve similar results at no cost by introducing new call recording and transcription features.
As Sameer Dhanrajani, CEO of AIQRATE and 3AI, noted, “The call records of 480 million users will provide an exceptionally authentic source of speech data across various Indian languages and dialects.” He further emphasized that Jio would likely pursue this initiative while preserving user privacy and ensuring subscriber consent, making the approach notable for its efficiency and scale.
AI-Ready Infrastructure
Reliance Jio has also announced plans to construct a Gigawatt (GW) scale AI-ready data center in Jamnagar, Gujarat, powered entirely by renewable energy. To illustrate the magnitude of this project, it could potentially replace the 195 existing data centers in India that currently boast a cumulative capacity of 1GW. However, achieving this ambitious goal may require investments of up to ₹25,000 crores and could take another three years to become operational, barring any pre-existing groundwork, according to industry experts.
It is noteworthy that operating AI data centers using renewable energy presents challenges, as AI servers consume four to five times more power and require significant cooling. Currently, only 20% of India’s data center power consumption is derived from renewable sources. Companies such as Nxtra, CtrlS, and S T Telemedia are aiming for net-zero emissions by 2031, which presents additional challenges for Reliance Jio.
To effectively compete with global hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, Reliance Jio will need to forge strategic alliances with international leaders in AI technology, including OpenAI, Meta, and Google. It remains unclear whether Jio intends to position itself as an infrastructure provider or as a managed cloud service.
Market Implications
Rajiv Ranjan, associate director of cloud & AI at IDC India, remarked, “The introduction of such initiatives by Reliance Jio can potentially make the training and inference of AI models more affordable.” In addition to competitive pricing, Jio will need to match the capabilities, security measures, and integration features offered by hyperscalers. The entry of Reliance Jio into the cloud services arena presents a favorable opportunity for enterprises seeking to diversify their multi-cloud strategies, particularly as pricing from global hyperscalers has reached a plateau.
As the Indian public cloud market is projected to reach $26.1 billion by 2027, with a five-year CAGR of 28.5%, domestic IT leaders are increasingly evaluating the criteria for distributing workloads among multiple cloud providers. The availability of a local alternative to global tech giants will undoubtedly be beneficial for the market.
