Update, 23 October 2026: This story has been corrected against Meta's announcement: Meta gives no delivery date or lease length, and the India tax holiday is narrower than first described.
Meta will lease a 168-megawatt AI data centre in Jamnagar, Gujarat, that Reliance Industries will build and run. Meta's announcement, published on 9 June 2026 and updated on 12 June, calls it Meta's first AI-enabled data centre in India. Meta has options to expand beyond the first 168MW.
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"We're proud to be working with Reliance to build our first AI-enabled data center in India." Mark Zuckerberg, Meta
What was confirmed
Reliance will handle design, construction, utilities, renewable power supply, connectivity and operations, according to Meta and Telecom Review Asia's report of the joint statement. The site is to run on renewable energy and cool with desalinated seawater, and Meta will pay the full cost of the energy and water it uses. The same report says the facility is expected to be operational within two years and describes it as Meta's first built-to-suit capacity in India. Meta's own post does not give a date.
The links behind the deal
Meta invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms, Reliance's digital arm, in 2020, as w.media notes when summarising Meta's release. The two later launched an initiative to bring Meta's open-source AI models to Indian businesses and developers.
Meta also announced renewable power deals in India. Its post lists 837 MW of new solar and wind projects with CleanMax in Rajasthan and Karnataka, taking the total with CleanMax above 900 MW, and 88 MW with Fourth Partner Energy across four states. Meta describes the total as nearly 1GW. These are separate from Jamnagar, and reports differ on whether Meta buys the power itself or only the environmental attributes.
Why India
India offers a tax holiday to 2047, announced in the February 2026 Budget, for foreign cloud providers that serve customers worldwide from Indian data centres. It has conditions: sales to Indian customers must go through an Indian reseller entity and be taxed. It is not a blanket zero tax for any hyperscaler. Meta is leasing capacity, not selling cloud services, so the holiday is not a clear fit for this deal.
Capacity forecasts vary widely. One report launched by India's IT ministry puts 2030 capacity at 4 to 8 GW, while other estimates put it near 6.5 GW. The gap comes from different definitions of capacity.
What this means for Nigeria and Africa
The deal shows where global AI compute is going: places with cheap renewable power, cable landing stations and government incentives. Nigeria has the demand but not yet the power. Installed data centre capacity in Nigeria is a small fraction of what India is planning, and operators describe unreliable grid power as the main constraint, according to TechCabal and Techpoint. Airtel's planned 38MW Nxtra facility in Lagos would be about a quarter of Jamnagar's first phase.
For African readers, the effect is indirect. Meta has announced no comparable African capacity for these services, which matters for latency and for data residency rules that require some data to stay in the country.
What it would take for Nigeria to land a deal like this
Jamnagar works because three things line up: a builder that supplies its own renewable power, cooling water, and a government offering long tax incentives. Nigeria has strong demand and several subsea cables landing in Lagos, but grid power is the weak link operators keep naming. Until a Nigerian site can promise stable, affordable power at the scale of tens of megawatts, hyperscalers are likely to keep serving African users from Europe, the Middle East and India.
What Meta has not said about the Jamnagar site
- Financial terms and lease length were not disclosed.
- Which AI workloads will run in Jamnagar.
- Whether the capacity is new or already part of Reliance's existing Jamnagar campus.
- Construction progress. Neither company has given an update since June.
One 168MW lease tells us less about India than about what AI infrastructure needs: power, water and a stable tax position.
