Reliance Looks Beyond Oil with AI, Jio Growth Push
Reliance’s annual report casts AI, digital services, retail and new energy as the next engines of growth while its oil-to-chemicals business continues to bankroll the transition.
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Reliance Industries Ltd is using artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, retail scale and clean energy manufacturing to frame the next phase of its expansion, as India’s most valuable private-sector company heads into an annual shareholder meeting where investors are likely to look for clearer signals on Jio’s future.
The oil-to-telecom-to-retail conglomerate released its integrated annual report for fiscal 2026 and notice for its 49th annual general meeting, scheduled for 19 June through video conferencing.
The meeting will consider the adoption of audited accounts, a dividend of ₹6 per share, the reappointment of Akash Ambani and Anant Ambani as directors, and approvals for material related-party transactions.
The annual report positions Reliance more as a technology and manufacturing platform built around AI, digital services, new energy and consumer businesses.
“As a deep-tech and advanced manufacturing company, Reliance’s growth strategy focuses on building future-ready solutions that harness AI and breakthrough innovation to drive sustainable value creation and accelerate India’s economic and social progress,” the company said in the report.
The framing comes as investors await the next phase of value creation from Jio Platforms, Reliance’s digital services arm.
Reuters reported this month that Reliance now plans to raise fresh funds through the Jio Platforms initial public offering, equal to about 2.5% of the company’s size, after dropping an earlier plan under which foreign investors would sell part of their holdings.
“Investors were not keen to sell and wanted to stay invested for the long term,” Reuters reported, citing one person familiar with the matter.
Jio’s listing has long been seen as central to Mukesh Ambani’s effort to transform Reliance from an oil-and-chemicals giant into a consumer, retail and technology company.
Reliance reported gross revenue of ₹11.76 trillion, or $124 billion, for fiscal 2026, Ebitda of ₹2.08 lakh crore and profit after tax of ₹95,754 crore, according to figures on the company’s investor relations page. Capital expenditure stood at ₹1.44 trillion.
The numbers reinforce the scale of the transformation underway. Oil-to-chemicals remains the company’s largest business by revenue, but Reliance’s consumer-facing businesses have become central to earnings growth and investor expectations.
Digital services reported gross revenue of ₹1.76 trillion in fiscal 2026, helped by subscriber additions, higher average revenue per user and growth in digital services.
Ebitda rose 17.8% from a year earlier to ₹76,560 crore, with the business carrying more than 241 exabytes of data traffic during the year, according to Reliance’s annual report.
Jio had more than 524 million customers as of March 2026, including more than 268 million 5G users and more than 27 million fixed broadband connections, Reliance said.
The company said Jio’s True5G network had surpassed the scale of its 4G network in three years and now accounted for 55% of wireless data traffic.
Reliance also used the annual report to sharpen its AI pitch. The company said Jio’s platform is built on an end-to-end proprietary technology stack spanning standalone 5G, indigenous unlicensed band radio technology, operating support and business support systems, device engineering, software, operating systems and applications.
“Reliance is committed to its vision of ‘AI Everywhere, For Everyone,’” the company said in the report.
It said it was pursuing a strategy to build sovereign AI infrastructure in India and had announced a plan to invest ₹10 trillion in multi-gigawatt AI-ready data centers, creating what it described as a sustainable, high-performance compute backbone to bring down the cost of AI for Indian users.
The company also highlighted an expanded partnership with Google Cloud. Under the arrangement, Google Cloud and Reliance will work together to support AI workloads for one of the world’s fastest-growing retail ecosystems, while Reliance will design, build and power a cloud facility and network infrastructure at Jamnagar, according to the annual report.
Reliance Retail recorded gross revenue of ₹3.71 trillion in fiscal 2026, up 12.1% from a year earlier, and Ebitda of ₹27,034 crore, up 7.7%, according to the annual report.
The company said the performance was driven by category mix, private labels and operating efficiencies across supply chain and fulfillment.
The retail business had a registered customer base of 387 million and annual transactions crossing 1.9 billion. Reliance also signed brand partnerships with Stella McCartney, Kurt Geiger, Max & Co. and Fabletics during the year, reinforcing its position as a preferred partner for international brands entering India, the company said.
In media and entertainment, Reliance reported gross revenue of ₹40,682 crore and Ebitda of ₹5,842 crore, with a 16.7% margin.
The company said JioHotstar delivered average monthly active users of more than 451 million, while JioStar’s television network held a 34.7% industry-leading share.
Reliance’s legacy oil-to-chemicals business continued to anchor the group by scale. Revenue from the segment rose 5.7% from a year earlier to ₹6.62 trillion, driven by higher domestic retail placements through Jio-bp and improved fuel cracks, partly offset by lower crude prices.
Segment EBITDA rose 10.1% to ₹60,546 crore, supported by stronger transportation fuel cracks, favorable domestic retail margins and feedstock optimization.
The company said the business remained resilient amid a volatile geopolitical environment, helped by agile feedstock sourcing and optimized product placement. Its April earnings release said O2C earnings were constrained by weak downstream chemicals margins and disruptions caused by conflict in the Middle East toward the end of the year.
Reliance’s oil and gas business was weaker, with revenue and Ebitda down 5.4% and 10.1%, respectively, because of natural production decline in the KG D6 block and lower price realization, partly offset by increased coal bed methane production. KG D6 produced about 25.9 million standard cubic meters of gas a day and about 18,170 barrels a day of oil and condensate during the year, the company said.
The most capital-intensive part of the transition is new energy. Reliance described the Dhirubhai Ambani Giga Energy Complex at Jamnagar as the world’s largest and most integrated new energy manufacturing ecosystem outside China, designed as a “sand-to-electrons-to-green molecules” platform spanning solar PV, battery storage, electrolysers and green chemicals.
The company said its solar PV module manufacturing facility became operational during the year, producing the first 200 MWp of high-efficiency heterojunction modules.
The facility is being scaled to 10 GWp a year in phases, with expansion to 20 GWp planned. Reliance also plans a 6 GWp solar power project in Andhra Pradesh, according to the report.
The battery giga-factory is targeted for commissioning from 2026 and will initially deliver 40 GWh of annual capacity, scalable to 100 GWh, while the electrolyser giga-factory is progressing as planned, the company said.
The report also points to Reliance’s effort to build intellectual property depth across its businesses. Reliance said its oil-to-chemicals business had filed 2,527 patent applications across more than 55 countries by 31 March 2026, with 1,177 patents granted. Jio Platforms and its subsidiaries had cumulatively filed 6,817 patents, with 1,009 granted globally, including 538 in India.
