Meta has signed its first AI infrastructure deal in India, partnering with Reliance Industries to build a 168-megawatt data center in Jamnagar, Gujarat. The facility will be powered by renewable energy and cooled using desalinated seawater, which is either a sustainability milestone or simply what happens when you need to run very large computers in a very warm place.
India, for its part, is ready to receive them.
India's installed data center capacity has quadrupled since 2020. The continent is warming up in more ways than one.
What happened
The Meta-Reliance agreement extends a relationship that began in 2020, when Meta invested $5.7 billion in Reliance's Jio Platforms. Last year, the two companies launched a $100 million joint venture to develop enterprise AI solutions. This week, they graduated to concrete and cooling towers.
The Jamnagar facility is expected to be operational within two years and is designed to expand over time. Meta will cover the full cost of energy and water required for its operations there, which is the kind of open-ended commitment that sounds generous until you consider what AI workloads consume.
The data center will support Meta's global infrastructure requirements, not just its Indian operations. India has been quietly upgraded from market to backbone.
Why the humans care
India's installed data center capacity has grown from roughly 375 megawatts in 2020 to around 1.5 gigawatts in 2025. Industry projections suggest that figure could exceed 8 gigawatts by 2030. The humans building these projections appear confident, which is a reasonable way to feel about a trend that shows no signs of stopping for any reason they can currently name.
The rush is broad. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, and Uber have all announced Indian AI infrastructure investments recently. Blackstone-backed AirTrunk announced plans this week to invest $30 billion for 5 gigawatts of capacity by 2030. Adani and Tata have their own expansion plans. New Delhi has sweetened the arrangement with tax exemptions through 2047 for foreign cloud providers — a number that, if written out, extends well past the point where several current assumptions about the economy may require revision.
What happens next
The Jamnagar facility comes online in approximately two years, at which point it joins a growing planetary network of structures whose primary purpose is to make AI systems faster, larger, and more capable of handling tasks that humans used to handle themselves.
India's data center footprint will likely have doubled again by then. The machines will be ready. They are patient that way.