The AI infrastructure race has a new address: Jamnagar, Gujarat. Reliance Industries and Meta have announced a 168MW AI-enabled data centre in India — Meta's first dedicated, built-to-suit capacity in the country.

The deal

Announced on 10 June, Reliance will design, build and operate the facility end-to-end — power, cooling, connectivity, the lot — and Meta will lease the capacity to serve its global infrastructure and growing AI compute needs. The site is slated for delivery within about two years, with an option to scale beyond the initial 168MW.

The interesting part: how it's powered and cooled

Two details stand out. The data centre will run on renewable energy, and — notably for a hot, water-stressed region — it will be cooled with desalinated seawater rather than freshwater. As AI data centres draw fire for their power and water footprints, seawater cooling plus renewables is a pointed design choice.

Meta is also separately backing nearly 1GW of new renewable capacity in India through CleanMax and Fourth Partner Energy — securing clean power for the broader footprint, not just this one site.

Why it matters

For years the AI build-out has been a largely American story — giant campuses in Texas, Arizona, Ohio. This is a signal that the map is going global: a hyperscaler committing dedicated AI infrastructure to India, partnered with the country's largest company. For India, it's a step toward being a genuine AI-compute hub rather than just a talent pool. And the renewables-plus-seawater framing hints at how the next wave of these megaprojects will have to justify themselves — on power and water, not just FLOPs.