Billionaire Ambani is building world’s biggest data centre: report
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Chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Mukesh Ambani speaks during the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit, at the Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India January 10, 2024. — Reuters
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Bloomberg reports that Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group is building the world’s largest data center by capacity in India, the latest in a flurry of global investment to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence services. It is the most.
The 67-year-old billionaire is buying AI semiconductor powerhouse Nvidia Corp and setting up a data center in the town of Jamnagar with a total capacity of three gigawatts, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified. Said on the condition of doing. Because the details are not public. That would make it much larger than any data center currently operating.
Ambani joins a growing group of tech companies including Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. that are pouring billions of dollars into data centers to provide AI capabilities to consumers around the world. 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 company called the Stargate Project.
A Reliance spokesman declined to comment, referring Bloomberg News to a recent speech by Mukesh’s son, Reliance Jioinfocom Ltd CEO Akash Ambani. The executive said the group was currently building a data center that would be completed within two years. “We want to complete it true Jamnagar style in record time — as we have always done at Jamnagar — in 24 months.”
Ambani’s project, if it goes ahead as envisioned, is notable for its sheer size. According to data provided by market intelligence firm DC Byte, the largest data centers in operation now are less than 1 gigawatt, which would make it many times larger than what is on the market.
Data center capacity is often measured in megawatts (millions of watts) of power that the site can feed into servers, cooling systems, and other equipment. The larger the data, the greater 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 run into the wireless business that drove down prices and drove many competitors out of business. Its playbook appears to be similar in AI and it has said it will offer rock-bottom rates for the inference or operating models powering ChatGPT. Estimating costs can be difficult for companies like OpenAI and local startups because they have to pay for computing resources every time a user queries.
It is not clear how Ambani will pay for the project, which could cost between $20 billion and $30 billion, based on the region’s costs for such facilities. Reliance Industries Ltd, the group’s parent listed entity, has about $26 billion on its balance sheet.
The Jamnagar facility will significantly increase India’s data center capacity, which is currently estimated at less than 1 gigawatt. Tripling that size would give the world’s most populous country the ability to accelerate its development of artificial intelligence.
Jamnagar, a town of more than 650,000 people, is located in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, and Ambani has family roots in the state itself. It is the hub of Reliance’s oil refining and petrochemical complex, the largest in the world.
The town is fast becoming central to Jamaat’s projects, which include expanding renewable energy. Reliance has said it is building a huge green energy complex spread over 5,000 acres with factories to manufacture photovoltaic panels, fuel cell systems, green hydrogen, energy storage and wind turbines.
Reliance aims to power the new data center as much as possible with renewable energy, the people said. According to one of the people, it will wind up projects under the Reliance Group that will generate solar, wind and green hydrogen energy.
However, it is practically impossible to provide a continuous and reliable stream of solar and wind energy without more permanent resources such as nuclear reactors, fossil fuel-fired plants or unusually large battery systems. It is possible to do. Reliance, which has its roots in petroleum products, may need fossil fuels to back up its data centers.
The world’s largest data centers by capacity are now located in the US and owned by tech giants. According to DCByte, Microsoft’s largest facility in Boydton, Virginia, has about 600 megawatts and another 112 megawatts under construction, followed by operations at Google and MetaPlatforms Inc.
OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle did not specify the size of the data centers they will build as part of the Stargate effort. Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, has floated the idea of building 5 gigawatt facilities, but it’s unclear if they’re working.
Ambani has previously talked about his plans to lower prices in AI. “Leveraging our expertise in infrastructure, networking, operations, software, and data and collaborating with our global partners, we aim to deliver the world’s lowest AI inference costs, right here in India,” Ambani said at the company’s annual meeting last year. Shareholders meeting “This will make AI applications in India more affordable than anywhere else, making AI accessible to all.”
Demand for data centers equipped to host AI workloads is predicted with the emergence of generative AI, the type of AI that generates content based on gestures – such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Experts are predicting capacity shortages as businesses adopt chatbots and generative AI tools to streamline work and increase productivity.
According to consultancy McKinsey & Company, global demand for data center capacity will more than triple by 2030 and reach an annual level of 219 gigawatts. Capacity needs to expand by 2030, at least double the data center capacity built since 2000, the consultancy said.
