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Reliance joins hands with Google Cloud to put India’s AI future on steroids
MUMBAI: Reliance Industries has never done things by halves. On 29 August, India’s largest private company unfurled its latest grand project: a sweeping expansion of its alliance with Google Cloud, centred on a new, dedicated AI-first cloud region in Jamnagar, Gujarat. The ambition is as audacious as it is familiar. Having once upended India’s telecoms industry with Reliance Jio and cheap data, Mukesh Ambani is now training his firepower on artificial intelligence, promising to democratise access to computing muscle for the world’s most populous country.
The project is being pitched as India’s “AI leapfrog moment.” Reliance will design, build, and power state-of-the-art cloud facilities, all running on renewable energy and plugged into Jio’s sprawling fibre and digital network. Google will provide the brains: its AI hyper computer, a secure and integrated generative AI stack, and the know-how to run workloads of breath taking intensity. The facility, Reliance says, will meet global service-level standards and support the most demanding AI use cases—from training large models to building next-generation applications for consumers and enterprises.
Why Jamnagar? The coastal city is already the beating heart of Reliance’s refining and petrochemicals empire. It is also becoming a symbol of the company’s reinvention: its green energy giga factory is rising there, and now the AI cloud campus will sit alongside it. Running on renewable power, the project ticks boxes for sustainability even as it scales to hyper speed. Jio, meanwhile, will string high-capacity fibre links connecting Jamnagar to metros like Mumbai and Delhi, effectively wiring India’s AI ambitions to its business and political capitals.
Mukesh Ambani cast the partnership in almost civilisational terms: “Just as Jio and Google came together to democratise the internet for every Indian, we will now democratise intelligence for every Indian,” he declared. The subtext was clear: Reliance does not want to merely be a customer of AI; it wants to be the platform on which India builds its AI future.
For Google, the tie-up is equally strategic. The American giant has long struggled to monetise India at scale, despite Android’s dominance. Its alliance with Reliance, first forged through a $4.5bn investment in Jio Platforms in 2020, has been its best bet. Sundar Pichai, Google’s boss, was almost wistful: “Our work together over the last decade has helped bring affordable internet access to millions. And now, we are building on this to help shape the next leap with AI. This is only the beginning.”
The beginning it may be, but the context is fiercer. Microsoft has partnered with the Adani group to push Azure into Indian enterprises. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has invested heavily in local data centres. By anchoring Google Cloud in Reliance’s infrastructure, Ambani is offering it the biggest distribution muscle in the country—from India’s biggest retailer to its mightiest mobile operator.
Reliance has always built moats around scale and integration. Hydrocarbons fed petrochemicals; petrochemicals funded telecoms; telecoms birthed digital platforms; retail wrapped around them. Now AI is being woven into every strand. Reliance’s retail arm, one of the world’s fastest-growing, will be powered by predictive analytics and AI-first services. Its digital platforms can churn out generative-AI-powered customer tools. Even its energy and refining business can tap AI for predictive maintenance, efficiency, and emissions management.
The bet is as much about geopolitics as economics. AI compute has become a strategic resource, akin to oil in the 20th century. By hosting a dedicated, hyperscale AI cloud region in India, Reliance and Google are hedging against global bottlenecks in semiconductors and compute availability. They are also offering Indian enterprises and the government a “sovereign-flavoured” cloud alternative to relying wholly on Western or Chinese platforms.
The entire project will be underpinned by Reliance’s push into renewable power. The AI data centres, notorious for their energy hunger, will be fed through Reliance’s green energy parks and hydrogen initiatives. Jio’s high-capacity fibre, spanning metros and regions, adds the digital sinew to match the green muscle. The combination allows Reliance to brand the initiative not merely as profitable, but as sustainable—a key card to play with regulators, policymakers, and global investors.
For India, the stakes are towering. Domestic enterprises, startups, and public sector organisations often face prohibitive costs in accessing cutting-edge AI compute. By pooling Reliance’s infrastructure with Google’s stack, the hope is to lower barriers and accelerate adoption. Small businesses may soon have access to AI tools that were once the preserve of Silicon Valley. Universities and research institutes could run high-performance AI models without prohibitive cost. And the government could scale citizen-facing AI services in health, education, and agriculture.
But challenges remain. Building AI facilities is one thing; ensuring India has the talent, regulation, and guardrails to use them responsibly is another. AI also raises thorny issues of bias, surveillance, and security. Reliance’s ambition to become India’s AI backbone will inevitably attract scrutiny—whether from privacy hawks, antitrust watchdogs, or foreign competitors.
Yet, if history is a guide, Reliance has a knack for bending markets to its will. When Jio entered telecoms in 2016, it offered free calls and dirt-cheap data, triggering a brutal price war that wiped out rivals and left India with the world’s cheapest mobile internet. Now, Ambani appears ready to repeat the trick with AI: offer access at scale, bundle services across Reliance’s ecosystem, and set the floor so low that competitors struggle to keep up.
The Jamnagar AI cloud, then, is not just about servers and software. It is about a new architecture of power: technological, economic, and political. If it works, Reliance and Google may indeed make India a global leader in artificial intelligence. If it fails, it could end up as another white elephant in the deserts of Jamnagar.
For now, though, one thing is certain. India’s AI race has just been given a jolt of steroids—and Mukesh Ambani is holding the syringe.
(The picture featured above is representational of two businessmen joining hands and there is no intention to insinuate that it resembles either Mukesh Ambani or Sunder Pichai. It is an AI generated image)
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
