Google partners with Reliance Group to seize the Indian AI market
Google's collaboration with India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries, packages the $396 AI Pro plan into Jio 5G, offered for free for 18 months. The first batch targets young people aged 18 to 25, with the plan including Gemini 2.5 Pro, the image generation tool Veo 3.1, and 2TB of cloud storage.
India's 450 million active internet users are a battleground for tech giants. Google's move directly confronts Microsoft's OpenAI alliance, which has already rooted itself in India through Azure cloud services. The Indian AI market is expected to reach $170 billion by 2030, growing at 38% annually, second only to the US and China, ranking third globally.
Jio covers 430 million users, paving a highway for Google. The free 18 months is to cultivate user habits, and the conversion rate at the end of the period directly determines success or failure. Meta's WhatsApp AI and Amazon Alexa are also competing for territory in India. Reliance itself is also developing large models, and cooperating with Google is essentially learning while doing; who knows when they might turn against each other. Additionally, India's data localization and privacy regulations are not yet finalized, which could become an invisible barrier. For the crypto circle, Google's cloud infrastructure also supports many blockchain nodes and DApps, and AI tools may be integrated into on-chain data analysis in the future.