Reliance, Meta set up $97.3m JV for enterprise AI in India

Reliance Industries and Meta have formed a joint venture to develop enterprise AI services in India.

The new company, Reliance Enterprise Intelligence Limited (REIL), will receive a combined investment of about 855 crore rupee (US$97.3 million).

Reliance will hold a 70% stake, while Meta’s subsidiary Facebook Overseas will own the remaining 30%.

REIL will use Meta’s open source Llama models and Reliance’s digital infrastructure to build and distribute AI platforms for businesses.

It will offer AI platform-as-a-service and ready-made AI solutions for sectors like sales, advertising, IT operations, finance, and customer service.

The company, a subsidiary of Reliance Intelligence Limited, aims to provide flexible AI deployment options for Indian enterprises.

🔗 Source: Fortune

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Reliance Enterprise Intelligence Limited (REIL) is a new venture from Reliance with Meta for enterprise AI, and it plans to use Llama, the open-source large language models from the company. Deployment timelines and available Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) capacity remain unspecified 1.
Reliance announced a 2023 collaboration with NVIDIA to build AI infrastructure said to exceed India’s fastest supercomputer, and it has not shared the current operational status 2.
Reliance pitches the Jamnagar data center in Gujarat as a flagship for its AI strategy, and it is still under development 3. The company with NVIDIA outlined AI-ready computing sites that could scale to 2,000 megawatts (MW) of power over time, and it is not clear if any are live today 2. Its $97.4 million initial investment 1 looks modest next to a separate OpenAI and NVIDIA letter of intent that includes plans where NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion as new systems are deployed 4. OpenAI is the research lab behind ChatGPT 4.

REIL plans hybrid cloud and on-premises (deployed in a company’s own data center) options 5. That opens doors for Indian system integrators, managed service providers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Teams in Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), security, or industry AI can build early apps.
REIL targets sales, marketing, IT operations, finance, and customer service 5. Providers with prebuilt connectors, compliance toolkits, or deployment accelerators for these functions can win early deals. Clear partner tiers, qualification rules, and onboarding steps would help firms commit.