India’s government is pledging billions in financial support for the country’s ambitions around artificial intelligence (AI), and a Mumbai-headquartered energy group has said it plans to build what it calls the “world’s largest” data center in Jamnagar. Reliance Industries, led by Mukesh Ambani, a billionaire and the company’s chairman, already has a partnership with California-based technology group Nvidia. The companies last year said they would collaborate in an effort to develop AI supercomputers in India. They plan to jointly build AI infrastructure in the country, and Nvidia last year said it would provide its Blackwell AI processors for a reported 3-GW data center that would be built by Reliance. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO who spoke with POWER at meeting last summer in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the time of last year’s deal said, “It makes complete sense that India should manufacture its own AI. You should not export data to import intelligence. India should not export flour to import bread.” Nvidia also has a partnership with Tata Group, India’s largest business conglomerate. Huang at the Las Vegas meeting said his company’s growth is tied to “always looking for ways to get the adoption of accelerated computing in more applications. The first thing that we’re doing is that we’re accelerating every application we can. And when we accelerate an application, not only do we speed it up, we reduce the cost of computing, we reduce the energy consumed by a lot.” Ambani, discussing plans for a data center buildout in India, has said his country “can use intelligence to actually bring prosperity to all the people and bring equality to the world. Apart from the U.S. and China, India has the best digital connectivity infrastructure.” The race to build data centers is being accompanied by an urgent need to supply electricity for the energy-intensive AI industry. Several forms of energy, both thermal and renewable, are being tapped to supply power. Nuclear power is among the options; TerraPower, a company founded by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, recently announced a deal for its Natrium nuclear technology to support development of data centers. Most power generation in India comes from coal-fired power plants. The country’s Ministry of Coal has said more than 70% of the country’s electricity comes from coal-burning facilities.
India’s government recently said it would invest nearly $1.2 billion to help finance AI projects and companies working in the sector. Several large data center projects already are underway in India. CtrlS, a cloud computing company based in India, is behind a facility in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat state. The government of Telangana state said it is working with Ursa Clusters, the data center division of investment manager Blackstone, and Tillman Global Holdings—a New York-based investment group—to build several data centers. Ursa Clusters was among companies announcing data center plans for India at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The company said it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Telangana government for a 100-MW data center in Hyderabad. Blackstone, which recently agreed to buy a natural gas-fired power plant in Virginia to support data center energy demand, said it would build a 150-MW facility in Hyderabad, and Tillman Global Holdings announced a 300-MW data center, also in Hyderabad, an area that is a focus of India’s data center industry. Other companies with facilities in the region include Microsoft and Iron Mountain. AWS has a cloud operation Hyderabad and also has announced plans for more data centers in the city. A 1.2-GW data center under construction in Portugal, being build by Portuguese group Start Campus, is among the world’s largest such campuses announced to date. —Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER.
