From Bloomberg, January 23/24:
- Reliance joins rush of tech companies building data centers
- Ambani plans aggressive pricing in offering AI services
Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group is building what may become the world’s biggest data center by capacity in India, the latest in a blitz of global investments to capitalize on booming demand for artificial intelligence services.
The 67-year-old billionaire is buying Nvidia Corp.’s powerful AI semiconductors and setting up a data center in the town of Jamnagar that’s expected to have a total capacity of three gigawatts, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t public. That would make it far bigger than any data center now operating.
Ambani is joining a growing cohort of tech companies including Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. that are pouring billions of dollars into data centers to deliver AI capabilities to customers worldwide. This week, OpenAI, SoftBank Group Corp. and Oracle Corp. pledged to invest $100 billion to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the US through a new entity called Stargate Project.
A Reliance spokesman declined comment, directing Bloomberg News to a recent speech from Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. CEO Akash Ambani, Mukesh’s son. The executive said at the time the conglomerate was building a datacenter to be completed within two years. “We want to complete it true Jamnagar style in record time — as we have always done in Jamnagar — in 24 months.”
Ambani’s project, if it goes ahead as envisioned, stands out for its sheer size. The largest data centers operating now are less than 1 gigawatt, according to data provided by market intelligence firm DC Byte, which would make his several times larger than what’s on the market.
Data center capacity is often measured in the megawatts (millions of watts) of electricity that the site can feed into servers, cooling systems and other equipment. The larger the figure, the higher the volume of computing operations it can support. And AI models are notoriously compute-intensive....
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