Reliance, L&T Make $13.5 Billion Push Into AI Data Centers
India’s digital-infrastructure pipeline for 2025 has swelled to nearly $60 billion as Visakhapatnam emerges as a key hub for high-density AI compute.
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Reliance Industries Ltd and Larsen and Toubro Ltd announced $13.5 billion in new data center investments on Wednesday, 26 November, in one of the largest single-day expansions of India’s digital infrastructure pipeline as demand for AI computing surges.
Reliance’s data center venture Digital Connexion, a partnership with Canadian alternative-investment giant Brookfield Asset Management and US-based data center operator Digital Realty, will spend $11 billion over the next five years to build a 1-gigawatt AI-focused campus in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh.
The move formalizes Reliance’s entry into the data center business after Mukesh Ambani outlined plans in August to scale up AI infrastructure.
In a separate development, Samsung chairperson Lee Jae-yong hosted Reliance chief Mukesh Ambani in Seoul this week, signaling a renewed push to expand cooperation on 6G networks, AI-ready data centers and energy-storage systems.
Samsung said the discussions covered next-generation telecom equipment and batteries for data-center stability, with semiconductor collaboration viewed as an adjacent area given Samsung’s AI-infrastructure strategy.
Ambani has also created a separate subsidiary for AI-ready data centres, developed with global partners such as Alphabet and Meta.
Meanwhile, L&T announced a parallel $2.5-billion expansion, saying it will develop five new data centers with a combined minimum capacity of 300 megawatts, including one in Visakhapatnam.
The company only began operating its first facility late last year, making the expansion a significant escalation of its digital push.
The two announcements add momentum to India’s increasingly crowded investment pipeline.
Nearly $60 billion in data-center commitments have been disclosed so far this year, driven by Reliance, L&T, the Tata and Adani groups, and global hyperscalers such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
Visakhapatnam has emerged as the focal point of this boom. More than $26 billion in investment is now planned for the city alone, targeting by 2031 at least 2GW of capacity, a figure that would exceed India’s current national capacity of about 1.4-1.5GW, according to S&P Global.
Part of the acceleration traces back to Google’s October announcement that it would set up its largest AI-native data center hub outside the US in Visakhapatnam, strengthening the city’s position as a strategic location for subsea cable landings and cloud infrastructure.
The surge in investment has been reinforced by new corporate entrants. Last week, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and private-equity firm TPG announced a $2 billion equity deal to build a network of AI-ready data centers under a new venture called HyperVault.
Analysts said the back-to-back announcements signal the start of a multi-year race to build domestic capacity for AI workloads, high-density compute, and power-efficient data-center operations, all areas where India is still catching up with global peers but where domestic demand is rising sharply.
