The timing reflects how central India has become to Meta’s business. The company had 3.56 billion daily active users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger in the first quarter of 2026, with India accounting for the largest share of Facebook users and ranking as its top market for Meta AI usage. Running that scale of operations from infrastructure based elsewhere has been a persistent gap.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an official statement released Wednesday, said the Jamnagar facility would help the company scale its AI infrastructure globally while deepening its investment in India. “We’re proud to be working with Reliance to build our first AI-enabled data centre in India,” he said.
The facility will support Meta’s AI compute needs and its longer-term ambitions around what the company calls “personal superintelligence”. Reliance will lead construction under a built-to-suit model, while Meta will lease and use the capacity. The site will run on renewable energy and be cooled with desalinated seawater, with Meta covering power and water costs. The company has separately contracted nearly 1 GW of additional clean energy in India through agreements with CleanMax and Fourth Partner Energy.
Jamnagar already hosts Reliance’s refining and petrochemical operations, and the company is building one of the largest data centre campuses in the world there, drawing on its solar, wind and green hydrogen projects. “This is a transformative moment for India’s digital infrastructure,” said Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani.
“The building of India’s first built-to-suit data centre for a global technology leader of Meta’s scale shows India’s readiness to be at the forefront of the global AI revolution,” he said, adding that Jamnagar will become “a landmark destination for hyperscale AI computing”.
The location also works logistically. Its proximity to submarine cable landings on India’s western coast and Jio’s fibre network made it practical, and the site is expected to connect to Meta’s broader subsea cable infrastructure, including Project Waterworth.
The two companies go back to 2020, when Meta bought into Jio Platforms for $5.7 billion. A joint enterprise AI venture followed last year. The data centre is the largest and most capital-intensive move in that relationship so far.
India has attracted a wave of AI and cloud spending this year from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI and others. The government’s decision to classify data centres as strategic national infrastructure has helped move several of these announcements forward.
Meta spent $72.22 billion on capital expenditure in FY2025, most of it on AI and data centre build-out. Jamnagar is its first such deployment on Indian soil.
(Edited By Harini TS)