Billionaire Ambani plans world’s biggest data centre in India: Bloomberg

NEW DELHI: Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group is building what may become the world’s biggest data centre by capacity in India, the latest in a blitz of global investments to capitalise on booming demand for artificial intelligence services.

The 67-year billionaire is buying Nvidia Corp’s powerful AI semiconductors and setting up a data centre 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 centre 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 centres to deliver AI capabilities to companies 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.

Ambani’s project, if it goes ahead as envisioned, stands out for its sheer size. The largest data centres operating now are less than 1 gigawatt, according to data provided by market intelligence from DC Byte, which would make his several times largest than what’s on the market.

Data centre capacity is often measured in the megawatts 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.

Ambani built his reputation with aggressive business tactics, including a ruthless rush into the wireless business that sent prices plummeting and put several rivals out of business. His playbook seems similar in AI and he has said he will offer rock-bottom rates for what’s known as inferencing, or operating models like the ones that power ChatGPT. Inferencing costs can be onerous for companies like OpenAI and local startups because they have to pay for computing resources every time a user has a query.

It’s not clear how Ambani would pay for the project, which could cost $20-30 billion based on expenses in the region for such facilities. Reliance Industries Limited, the group’s primary listed entity, has the equivalent of about $26 billion on its balance sheet.

The Jamnagar facility would substantially boost India’s data centre capacity, now estimated at less than 1 gigawatt. Tripling that size would give the world’s most populous country the potential to greatly accelerate its development of artificial intelligence.

Jamnagar, a town of over 650,000 people is located in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, and Ambani himself has familial roots in the state. It’s the hub of Reliance’s oil refining and petrochemicals complex, the world’s largest.

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The town is becoming increasingly control to the conglomerate’s plans that include a push into renewable energy. Reliance has said its building a gigantic green energy complex spread over 5,000 acres with factories to make photo-voltaic panels, fuel cell systems, green hydrogen, and energy storage and wind turbines.

Reliance aims to power the new data centre as much as possible with renewable energy, said the people. it will abut Reliance Group projects under way that will produce solar, wind and green hydrogen energy, according to one of the people.

It’s virtually impossible, however, to supply a continuous and dependable stream of solar and wind power without more consistent resources such as a nuclear reactors, fossil fuel-fired plants or extraordinarily large battery systems to back it up. Reliance, whose roots lie in petroleum products, may require fossil fuels to back up its data centres.

The world’s biggest data centres by capacity are now all located in the US and owned by tech giants. Microsoft’s facility in Boydton, Virginia, is the largest with capacity of almost 600 megawatt and another 12 megawatts under construction, followed by Google and Meta Platforms Inc. operations, according to DC Byte.

OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle didn’t specify the size of the data centres they would build as part of the Stargate effort. Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI, has floated the idea of building 5-gigawatt facilities but it’s unclear whether they’re in the works.