On the sidelines of India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, Nita and Mukesh Ambani, along with Isha Ambani, welcomed former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to their home in Mumbai for an intimate evening centred on friendship, meaningful dialogue, and a shared appreciation for art and culture.
The gathering reflected the Ambani family’s longstanding engagement with global leaders across sectors and underscored Mumbai’s position as a crossroads of diplomacy, business, and culture.
The evening unfolded as a celebration of ideas and cross-cultural exchange, reinforcing bonds between India and the United States beyond formal state platforms.
Just days later, on 19 February 2026, in New Delhi, Mukesh Ambani took the stage at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, themed AI for VIKSIT BHARAT. As Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries Limited, he described the summit as a defining chapter in India’s technological evolution.
Addressing distinguished guests and fellow citizens, Ambani positioned artificial intelligence as central to India’s ambition of becoming a fully developed nation by 2047, the centenary of Independence.
He credited Prime Minister Narendra Modi for providing vision and leadership to the summit, and acknowledged the role of Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and his team in organising the event at a scale aligned with India’s global aspirations.
Ambani framed AI not merely as another technological shift, but as a transformative force comparable to a modern-day Akshaya Patra, capable of delivering boundless gains in knowledge, productivity, and prosperity.
If harnessed wisely, he suggested, AI could usher in an era of superabundance and significantly narrow global inequalities.
The address confronted a central global debate: whether AI would concentrate power among a few nations and corporations, or democratise opportunity worldwide. Ambani contrasted a future of expensive, concentrated compute power controlled by the Global North with an alternative vision of affordable, accessible AI for all.
He predicted that India would emerge as one of the greatest AI powers of the 21st century, citing the country’s demographic strength, democratic framework, development trajectory, digital infrastructure, and vast data generation capabilities.
India’s digital achievements over the past decade formed the foundation of this confidence. The country is the world’s largest mobile data consumer, with nearly one billion internet users and some of the lowest data costs globally.
The Aadhaar system now covers 1.4 billion digital identities, while UPI processes more than 12 billion transactions monthly. India also ranks among the top three startup ecosystems globally, with over 100,000 startups and more than 100 unicorns. Its Digital Public Infrastructure stack is increasingly being adopted internationally.
Ambani noted that Jio, with more than 500 million subscribers, played a pivotal role in expanding broadband, 4G, 5G, and home connectivity, and would now take on an even larger role in the AI transformation.
On behalf of Reliance Group and Jio Intelligence, Ambani made three major announcements.
First, Jio would transition from connecting India to the Internet Era to connecting India to the Intelligence Era. The company aims to deliver intelligence across sectors, government services, and social development with the same affordability and scale that transformed connectivity.
India, he emphasised, cannot afford to rent intelligence, and Jio intends to reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as it reduced the cost of data.
Second, Jio and Reliance will invest ₹10 lakh crores over the next seven years beginning this year. The investment, he clarified, is patient and disciplined nation-building capital focused on long-term economic value and strategic resilience rather than speculative gains.
Third, Jio Intelligence will build sovereign compute infrastructure through three initiatives: multi-gigawatt AI-ready data centres in Jamnagar, with over 120 MW coming online in the second half of 2026; leveraging up to 10 GW of surplus green energy anchored by solar assets in Kutch and Andhra Pradesh.
And deploying a nationwide edge-compute layer integrated with Jio’s network to bring low-latency intelligence closer to citizens, from kirana stores to classrooms and farms.
When compute becomes infrastructure, he argued, innovation becomes inevitable.
Ambani outlined five guiding principles for Jio Intelligence. The initiative aims to power deep-tech and advanced manufacturing while extending benefits to agriculture, small businesses, and the informal sector. AI would focus on multiplying productivity and efficiency rather than functioning merely as a conversational tool.
A major thrust would be multilingual capability across all Indian languages, ensuring inclusion for farmers, artisans, and students learning in their mother tongues. Responsibility, data security, and trust would be foundational commitments.
He also asserted that AI would create new high-skill jobs rather than eliminate employment. Finally, the emphasis would shift from building the best model to building the strongest ecosystem for speed and scale.
To achieve this, Jio plans partnerships with Indian enterprises, startups, IITs, IISc, and global technology leader, positioning India not as an importer of intelligence but as a co-architect of the AI century.
Ambani detailed early applications aimed at inclusive development.
In education, JioShikshak is being deployed as an adaptive AI teaching assistant across 22 languages, targeting 250 million schoolchildren and 50 million higher education students.
In healthcare, Jio ArogyaAI offers first medical guidance in under five minutes, in local languages, accessible on any phone.
In agriculture, JioKrishi translates satellite imagery and precision weather data into voice-based advice for 140 million farmers to help boost incomes.
For everyday services, JioBharatIQ functions as a voice-first AI companion to help citizens learn, earn, and access government services at scale.
AI wearables and connected home devices, including JioFrames, aim to make intelligence ambient and conversational. Through JioHotstar, AI will also amplify multilingual storytelling and project India’s cultural heritage globally.
The summit’s strong global participation, Ambani suggested, signaled that AI is becoming a people’s movement worldwide. He stressed that cooperation rather than polarization would determine the success of this movement.
India, he said, is uniquely positioned as a bridge between the Global South and Global Nort, reinforcing the broader vision of One Earth, One Family, One Future.
From a cultural evening in Mumbai hosting a global political figure to a sweeping national blueprint for AI sovereignty in New Delhi, the Ambanis’ week reflected a blend of diplomacy, industry, and long-term ambition, one rooted in positioning India at the center of the emerging AI century.
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