Meta’s computing power leasing first takes off in India: a 168 MW data center tackles data sovereignty and escalates the covert infrastructure battle among billionaires

Meta is turning its idle computing power into a new revenue stream, quietly reshaping the business landscape around AI infrastructure in India.

As reported by Wall Street Journal, Meta is preparing an internal project called "Meta Compute" to lease its excess computing power to enterprise clients, transforming infrastructure that was once a drag on capital expenditure into a revenue engine.

This move by Mark Zuckerberg is profoundly altering the competitive dynamics between India's two billionaires, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani.

Last month, Ambani's Reliance Industries announced a partnership with Meta to jointly build a 168-megawatt data center in Jamnagar, Gujarat. This initiative offers enterprise clients the possibility of keeping sensitive data within India, directly challenging the existing cloud computing landscape.

For highly regulated sectors in India like banking, insurance, and healthcare, data sovereignty has long been a core barrier to adopting public cloud services.

The Meta-Reliance collaboration could allow local enterprises to deploy and fine-tune AI models locally without cross-border data transfers, providing a compliance solution that Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have not been able to fully address.

Adani Moves First, AI Infrastructure Competition Heats Up

Prior to Ambani's alliance with Meta, Adani had a clear lead in India's AI infrastructure race.

Leveraging its deep roots in ports, airports, and power grids, the Adani Group has aggressively expanded hyperscale data centers and entered a strategic partnership with Google to provide infrastructure support.

Energy costs are the core variable in this competition. Adani has built the world's largest single-location clean energy project in Gujarat, a key part of its $100 billion AI computing power strategy.

Ambani has responded with an even bolder move, advancing an energy facility spanning 550k acres—roughly three times the size of Singapore. Reliance claims it will become one of the world's lowest-cost round-the-clock green power sources once completed.

A notable background factor: the rise of generative AI has fundamentally reshaped India's comparative advantage logic.

Cheap English-speaking technical labor was once the core competitiveness of India's software outsourcing industry. Now, using solar and wind power to produce AI computing power at low cost has become the new high ground.

Thus, neither Ambani nor Adani have roots in software outsourcing, allowing them to compete directly in this emerging arena without being burdened by legacy business.

The Data Sovereignty Value of the Meta-Reliance Alliance

On the surface, the Meta-Reliance partnership is a standard infrastructure lease deal, but its deeper value lies in creating a compliant AI application pathway for Indian enterprises.

Take banking as an example: a Mumbai-based bank could theoretically fine-tune an open-source model on servers in Jamnagar to automate credit underwriting without transferring any personal financial data abroad.

This solution is difficult to achieve under the current landscape dominated by AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, as storing sensitive customer information on U.S.-centric public cloud infrastructure often faces stringent regulatory scrutiny.

Meta's commercial ambitions in India go beyond this.

Zuckerberg recently hired an Indian fintech executive to lead WhatsApp's global business, aiming to extend its social media dominance into e-commerce and payments.

Meta's AI engine Muse Spark, designed specifically for conversational commerce, is also seen as a potential tool for local businesses to operate digital storefronts.

Additionally, Meta already owns a 9.99% stake in Jio Platforms, a telecom and media platform founded by Ambani over a decade ago, which is now seeking to position itself as a tech company for its IPO.

Duopoly: Strengths and Hidden Concerns

The shared choice of these two billionaires clearly reveals India's capital in the global AI division of labor: they are more inclined to build "launchpads" than to develop "rockets" themselves.

Neither Ambani (69) nor the five-years-younger Adani has any intention of betting on high-risk, capital-intensive ventures like building foundational AI models from scratch.

For Zuckerberg, India serves as an ideal testing ground to validate whether Meta can establish a foothold in the enterprise cloud market.

For Ambani, the alliance with Meta further confirms his unique value in India's business landscape: turning the art of coalition-building into a lasting competitive advantage.

Adani's competitive strength should not be underestimated.

Google's strategic support, combined with his foray into nuclear power—as India's state monopoly on nuclear energy recently opened to private capital—could provide another path to lower computing costs, supporting the continuous baseline power needed for AI queries.

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