Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and chairman of Reliance Industries, has unveiled an ambitious plan to build the country’s AI backbone through a new subsidiary — starting with strategic partnerships with Google Cloud and Meta.

At the company’s 48th annual general meeting on Friday, Ambani launched a new venture called Reliance Intelligence, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries. The new venture aims to create a national-scale AI infrastructure, including enterprise tools and services for a variety of sectors. The move comes as India looks to catch up in the global AI race long dominated by the U.S. and China.

“Reliance Intelligence will create a home for world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and product builders, combining the speed of research with the rigor of engineering,” Ambani said in his keynote, “so that ideas become innovations and applications, providing solutions to India and the world.”

To kick things off, Reliance has partnered with Google — one of its major tech partners — to build a dedicated AI cloud infrastructure in India. The network will start with a major data center in Jamnagar, a city in the western state of Gujarat.

The dedicated cloud region will enable Reliance to offer AI-focused services to businesses of all sizes, developers, and government bodies, utilizing Jio’s network and its own energy assets to support large-scale deployments, the companies said in their joint statement.

“As Reliance’s largest public cloud partner, Google Cloud is not only powering the company’s mission-critical workloads, but we are also innovating with you on advanced AI initiatives,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a video message during the company’s virtual AGM. “This is only the beginning.”

Google did not immediately respond to a query about the financial terms of the partnership.

Reliance has also announced a joint venture with Meta, another of its major tech investors, to build and scale enterprise AI solutions for customers in India and select international markets. Under the agreement, Reliance and Meta have committed a combined investment of ₹8.55 billion (approximately $100 million) under a 70:30 ownership split, respectively.

The partnership will offer Meta’s Llama-based enterprise AI platform-as-a-service, allowing businesses to customize, deploy, and manage generative AI models for use cases across sales, marketing, IT, customer service, and finance. The joint venture will also provide a suite of pre-configured AI solutions, the companies said.

Reliance’s collaboration comes just weeks after Meta restructured its AI ventures into a new Superintelligence Labs, fueled by an expensive string of top AI hires. (Meta has reportedly pausing the hiring spree after concern from shareholders.)

“Through this joint venture, we’re putting Meta’s Llama models into real-world use,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a prepared statement.

The transaction is subject to customary regulatory approvals and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Reliance is planning to expand beyond India and take its flagship subsidiary, Reliance Jio Platforms to international markets, Ambani said. Ambani also revealed that Jio aims to file for an initial public offering in the first half of 2026, following much anticipation and initial delays.

Reliance is also reportedly eyeing a partnership with OpenAI, which recently introduced its sub-$5 ChatGPT subscription in India and announced its plans to set up an office in New Delhi later this year. The details of the partnership are likely to be announced during Sam Altman’s upcoming visit to India next month, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Reliance and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this year, Reliance’s arch-rival Bharti Airtel, the country’s second-largest telco after Jio, partnered with Perplexity to offer more than 360 million Airtel subscribers access to Perplexity Pro for 12 months.

Reliance has already partnered with Microsoft to offer its Azure cloud platform to Indian enterprises. The company also offers JioAICloud, a consumer-focused service that provides 100GB of free storage. The consumer cloud service has been used by 40 million users and is updated with voice search support and an AI Create Hub to turn photos into AI-powered reels, collages, and promo videos, the company announced at its annual general meeting.

Reliance also showcased its AI-based smart glasses, JioFrames, as its answer to Snap’s Spectacles and Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Similarly, the company is integrating AI into its streaming platform, JioHotstar, which has attracted over 600 million users and 300 million paying subscribers in the three months since its launch in February.

The new AI features include “Riya” voice assistant and content translation into Indian languages using AI-voice cloning and lip-syncing tech.

The Trump administration seems intent on controlling Intel’s ability to make key business decisions around its floundering foundry business unit.

According to reporting from the Financial Times, at a Deutsche Bank conference on Thursday, Intel’s CFO David Zinsner shared new details about the company’s recent deal with the Trump administration, which gave the U.S. government a 10% equity stake.

The deal was structured in a way to penalize Intel if it spins out its foundry business unit, which makes custom chips for outside customers, within the next few years.

Last week’s deal included a five-year warrant that would allow the U.S. government to take an additional 5% of Intel, at $20 a share, if the company held less than 51% equity in its foundry business. Zinsner said he expects that warrant to expire.

“I think from the government’s perspective, they were aligned with that; they didn’t want to see us take the business and spin it off or sell it to somebody,” he said.

Zinsner added that the company received $5.7 billion in cash on Wednesday, as a result of last week’s deal, according to Reuters. (That cash comes from the remaining grants previously awarded, but not yet paid, to Intel under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act.)

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today that the deal was still being ironed out.

Intel declined to comment on the deal beyond Zinsner’s remarks.

This deal structure is clearly a testament to the Trump administration’s desire to bring more chip manufacturing to the United States as many players in the industry turn to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s offshore manufacturing instead.

But this warrant also forces Intel to keep a business unit that is losing money. Intel Foundry reported an operating income loss of $3.1 billion during the second quarter and has been a source of strife for the semiconductor business.

There have been calls from analysts, board members, and investors alike to spin out the struggling foundry unit, which looked like it might actually happen last fall, before Intel Foundry’s architect, former CEO Pat Gelsinger, retired suddenly in December.

Threads is testing a new feature that makes it easy to share long-form text on the social network, Meta confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature lets users attach a block of text to a post instead of creating a thread of several different posts when looking to share more in-depth thoughts and ideas.

App researcher Radu Oncescu first spotted the new “text attachment” feature on iOS and shared a screenshot of it. According to the app’s description of the new feature, it’s designed to allow users to “attach longer text and get creative with styling tools to share deeper thoughts, news snippets, book excerpts, and more.”

The ability to share long-form content could help Threads retain creators and writers who want more distribution for articles that would otherwise be posted on their blogs or newsletter platforms like Substack. The feature also gets rid of the need for workarounds when looking to share text that goes beyond the word limit for posts, such as sharing a screenshot of a block of text in your phone’s Notes app.

Threads user Robert P. Nickson shared a post using the feature to show what it looks like to viewers. A snippet of the long-form text is displayed in a gray box within the post, which people can then click on to read and scroll through the full content.

Threads competitor X already offers a way for users to share long-form content on the platform with “Articles.” While X’s feature is only available for Premium subscribers, Threads’ feature is accessible to everyone, but that could change in the future.

Additionally, Threads only allows users to share text, whereas X’s lets people incorporate images and videos. Considering that the feature is still in the testing phase, it’s possible that Threads could add support for multimedia in the future.

Meta says it plans to bring this to more users in the future.

Support for long-form posts is the latest addition among a series of new features Threads has introduced over the past year, including DMs, fediverse integrations, custom feeds, AI enhancements, and more.

Threads recently topped 400 million monthly active users just two years since its launch. X, on the other hand, has north of 600 million monthly active users, according to previous statements made by former CEO Linda Yaccarino.