For decades, Mukesh Ambani has earned billions refining crude oil to make high-value petrochemicals. Now, the wealthiest Asian is looking to earn an even bigger fortune by refining data into premium tech solutions.
Even in 2016, when he first quipped, 'Data is the new oil,' he was repeating what, back then, was emerging wisdom: data will be just as valuable and scarce a resource in the 21st c. as hydrocarbons were in the previous 100 years.
He invested $50 bn to make Jio Platforms the world's largest data company. It's time for him to ask if he can bring his father Dhirubhai's refining chops into play and create higher-value AI products that will be demanded by other enterprises. Simply put, the goal of the freshly minted, wholly owned Reliance Intelligence, Mukesh Ambani announced at RIL's AGM last month, would be to discover the data-world equivalent of polymers, plastics and petrol.
Conventionally, AI buildouts have been restricted to managing scarce resources like land, capital, power and GPU supplies. Reliance has all four. Jamnagar will host his new AI network of GW-scale data centres that will be turbo-charged by Nvidia's Blackwell chips. Clean electricity will come from their New Energy Complex-4x the size of Tesla's Gigafactory.
As for capital, nobody in India can plough mega bucks into greenfield projects like Reliance. But Ambani would need a lot once more. The lion's share of the $320 bn capital expenditure of Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft in 2025 is for servers and data centres.
But companies are realising other ingredients are becoming scarce too. The most important of them all is dynamic, proprietary, expert-led datasets to train LLMs. Peak (free) data is a distinct possibility, much like peak oil, warns OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. It's all about achieving 'superintelligence', a hypothetical scenario where AI systems surpass human intelligence. A new set of labs is mushrooming, thick and fast.
Ambani has cherrypicked trusted partners to take the fight to his rivals. Google will be providing cloud infra. A separate $100 mn JV with Meta will strive to develop indigenous enterprise solutions for Indian businesses. He needs to have one more trusted ally in his corner.
Intersection of the energy and data industry is not unique to Ambani. The story of Saudi Arabia's transformation is also predicated on its bet on AI. Backed by its sovereign wealth fund, PIF, and delivered by a new state-owned AI company, Humain, the Kingdom is also ploughing $100 bn into building similar full-stack AI capabilities. It's the best time for the two sides to harness their strengths, using common links and shared objectives.
Both are trying to match the US and China, the two biggest AI hubs. Seeding homegrown AI capabilities instead of ceding the ground to global tech exporters is in equal parts national pride and strategic foresight. But unlike Big Tech, which has had years, if not decades, to perfect business models and technical expertise, the two upstarts are building ground up.
For both Reliance and PIF, unleashing their might on hardware may seem the easiest part, but that can't be the sole differentiator when the likes of Meta are laying undersea cables longer than the Earth's circumference. Tougher still is selling homegrown enterprise products to customers who might have access to competing global apps and software programmes.
The entire AI services value chain needs serious IT muscle. Both may seek deep-tech valuations, but neither has that DNA, and are starting from scratch to be one.
That's where the key actors come in. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi PIF, is also a Reliance board member. Humain's CEO, Tareq Amin, earned his stripes in technology development and automation at Reliance Jio. This chemistry needs to crystallise. A personal friend of Ambani, Rumayyan, also the chair of Saudi Aramco, was about to invest in Reliance's refinery in 2019. It didn't work out then. Can a second attempt turn out to be lucky?
Privacy and ethical usage still need to be tackled as guardrails and regulations on data protection gain teeth, even as existing data sets can be anonymised and synthetic data manufactured out of real-world interactions. Going ahead, RIL and Humain may face deeper concerns over transparency and oversight.
But for now, what is important is the direction and ambition. The 74 times that 'AI' featured in Ambani's latest AGM speech is a sign of direction. The ambition will be clearer once investments start flowing in.
Reliance has over a billion-strong customer base across the sprawling telecoms-retail-media-financial services empire. Many would be common. It gives a tremendous edge to mine and refine this dynamic data on consumer behaviour. That's the magic code for breaking into the real elite club of $1trn-plus market valuation.
Even in 2016, when he first quipped, 'Data is the new oil,' he was repeating what, back then, was emerging wisdom: data will be just as valuable and scarce a resource in the 21st c. as hydrocarbons were in the previous 100 years.
He invested $50 bn to make Jio Platforms the world's largest data company. It's time for him to ask if he can bring his father Dhirubhai's refining chops into play and create higher-value AI products that will be demanded by other enterprises. Simply put, the goal of the freshly minted, wholly owned Reliance Intelligence, Mukesh Ambani announced at RIL's AGM last month, would be to discover the data-world equivalent of polymers, plastics and petrol.
Conventionally, AI buildouts have been restricted to managing scarce resources like land, capital, power and GPU supplies. Reliance has all four. Jamnagar will host his new AI network of GW-scale data centres that will be turbo-charged by Nvidia's Blackwell chips. Clean electricity will come from their New Energy Complex-4x the size of Tesla's Gigafactory.
As for capital, nobody in India can plough mega bucks into greenfield projects like Reliance. But Ambani would need a lot once more. The lion's share of the $320 bn capital expenditure of Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft in 2025 is for servers and data centres.
But companies are realising other ingredients are becoming scarce too. The most important of them all is dynamic, proprietary, expert-led datasets to train LLMs. Peak (free) data is a distinct possibility, much like peak oil, warns OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. It's all about achieving 'superintelligence', a hypothetical scenario where AI systems surpass human intelligence. A new set of labs is mushrooming, thick and fast.
Ambani has cherrypicked trusted partners to take the fight to his rivals. Google will be providing cloud infra. A separate $100 mn JV with Meta will strive to develop indigenous enterprise solutions for Indian businesses. He needs to have one more trusted ally in his corner.
Intersection of the energy and data industry is not unique to Ambani. The story of Saudi Arabia's transformation is also predicated on its bet on AI. Backed by its sovereign wealth fund, PIF, and delivered by a new state-owned AI company, Humain, the Kingdom is also ploughing $100 bn into building similar full-stack AI capabilities. It's the best time for the two sides to harness their strengths, using common links and shared objectives.
Both are trying to match the US and China, the two biggest AI hubs. Seeding homegrown AI capabilities instead of ceding the ground to global tech exporters is in equal parts national pride and strategic foresight. But unlike Big Tech, which has had years, if not decades, to perfect business models and technical expertise, the two upstarts are building ground up.
For both Reliance and PIF, unleashing their might on hardware may seem the easiest part, but that can't be the sole differentiator when the likes of Meta are laying undersea cables longer than the Earth's circumference. Tougher still is selling homegrown enterprise products to customers who might have access to competing global apps and software programmes.
The entire AI services value chain needs serious IT muscle. Both may seek deep-tech valuations, but neither has that DNA, and are starting from scratch to be one.
That's where the key actors come in. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi PIF, is also a Reliance board member. Humain's CEO, Tareq Amin, earned his stripes in technology development and automation at Reliance Jio. This chemistry needs to crystallise. A personal friend of Ambani, Rumayyan, also the chair of Saudi Aramco, was about to invest in Reliance's refinery in 2019. It didn't work out then. Can a second attempt turn out to be lucky?
Privacy and ethical usage still need to be tackled as guardrails and regulations on data protection gain teeth, even as existing data sets can be anonymised and synthetic data manufactured out of real-world interactions. Going ahead, RIL and Humain may face deeper concerns over transparency and oversight.
But for now, what is important is the direction and ambition. The 74 times that 'AI' featured in Ambani's latest AGM speech is a sign of direction. The ambition will be clearer once investments start flowing in.
Reliance has over a billion-strong customer base across the sprawling telecoms-retail-media-financial services empire. Many would be common. It gives a tremendous edge to mine and refine this dynamic data on consumer behaviour. That's the magic code for breaking into the real elite club of $1trn-plus market valuation.
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