Meta has agreed to lease space in a new 168-megawatt data center in Jamnagar, Gujarat, that Reliance Industries will build and operate. It is Meta's first data center in India built specifically for its use, and it plugs India into Meta's global network of computing infrastructure.
Reliance will handle everything: design, construction, power, water, and day-to-day operations. Meta pays for the energy and water its operations use. The facility runs on renewable power and uses desalinated seawater for cooling, a practical answer to operating a power-hungry facility in a water-scarce region. Reliance says it will be ready within two years, with room to grow.
This deal is the third layer of a relationship that started in 2020, when Meta put $5.7 billion into Jio Platforms, Reliance's digital arm. Last year, the two companies launched a $100 million joint venture to bring Meta's open-source AI tools to Indian businesses. The Jamnagar facility is what makes that software commitment real: you cannot run AI services for a country of 1.4 billion people at scale without physical infrastructure sitting underneath.
India's installed data center capacity was about 375 megawatts in 2020. By 2025, it had reached 1.5 gigawatts. Industry projections point to over 8 gigawatts by 2030, which would be more than a fivefold increase in five years.
The rush is not accidental. India passed a data protection law in 2023, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, which gives the government authority to require that certain categories of personal data stay inside Indian borders. The banking regulator already requires all payment data to be stored inside India. For businesses in financial services, insurance, or healthcare serving Indian customers, the compliance clock is running. Having your data processed on servers in Frankfurt or Virginia may not be an option much longer.
Global investment is piling in fast. Blackstone-backed AirTrunk announced plans to spend $30 billion building over 5 gigawatts of data center capacity in India by 2030. That is more than three times India's entire current capacity from a single operator. Google broke ground on a $15 billion AI hub in Andhra Pradesh. Microsoft has committed over $17 billion. Amazon is targeting $35 billion by 2030. Indian conglomerates including Tata and Adani are also building.
For business operators outside India, there are two things worth watching. First, if your company does any business in India, or processes data belonging to Indian customers, the data localization rules mean you will need local infrastructure partnerships or agreements with providers who already have capacity there. Second, the sheer volume of new computing capacity being built in India will make AI tools cheaper and faster to access for Indian-market operations.
Reliance is positioning itself as the infrastructure landlord for all of this. It is not just building for Meta. It is building the capability to serve any global technology company that needs a presence in India and does not want to build its own facilities. That is a smart position in a market where land, power, water, and regulatory relationships are the scarce resources, and foreign companies have none of them.
Meta separately contracted nearly 1 gigawatt of new renewable energy across India through two local providers, CleanMax and Fourth Partner Energy, spread across Rajasthan, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh. That is a signal that this is not a one-facility plan. The energy contracts suggest Meta is preparing for a longer and larger build-out, even if the company has not announced what comes next.