Meta partners with Reliance on first AI-enabled data center in India

Meta and Reliance Industries unveiled an expanded strategic partnership to lease Meta's first AI-enabled data center in India. The arrangement deepens Meta's AI infrastructure presence in a market that is among its largest by user base, positioning the company to serve AI features — and increasingly its Avocado-era models — closer to hundreds of millions of Indian users.

The deal is part of the week's dominant compute-investment theme. Across the industry, infrastructure spending is surging: Amazon secured a $17.5B delayed-draw term loan for its AI capex ramp, AWS shipped Graviton5, and Microsoft expanded Azure Cobalt 200 VMs. Meta's India data center extends that arms race into a strategically vital emerging market where data-localization considerations and sheer user scale make local infrastructure increasingly necessary.

Partnering with Reliance — India's dominant telecom and digital conglomerate — gives Meta a powerful local ally for navigating regulation, land, power and distribution, mirroring how hyperscalers increasingly pair with regional champions. The move also aligns with Meta's pivot toward more controlled, capital-intensive AI (closed 'Avocado' models, the Scale AI investment): building dedicated AI data centers is the infrastructure complement to running fewer, larger proprietary models. The open questions are the deal's financial scale (undisclosed) and how quickly the facility comes online, but the signal is clear — Meta is committing serious capital to AI infrastructure in India.