Ambani's 'Meta' deal was discussed in Anant Ambani's pre-wedding, now the plan is made

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is setting up its first data center in India at the Reliance Industries campus in Chennai. This will help the American company process user-generated content locally on its core apps like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. According to media reports, the discussion between Mark Zuckerberg and Mukesh Ambani took place during Anant Ambani's pre-wedding ceremony in Jamnagar in early March and the deal was finalised. Let us also tell you what kind of benefits users and meta can get.

The campus is spread over 10 acres

With this campus, Meta will now be able to operate four to five nodes across multiple locations across the country, which will allow faster data processing in India, one of the world's largest markets, ET reported. Currently the data of Indian users comes to Meta's data center in Singapore. According to people in the know, along with the local data center, apart from the content, local ads will also improve the user experience.

Also, the cost of global data centers will come down. The 10-acre site in Chennai's Ambattur Industrial Estate is a three-way joint venture between Brookfield Asset Management, Reliance Industries and Digital Realty. It can reach 100-megawatt (MW) IT load capacity. No official statement has come out regarding this yet..

Where will Facebook build a data center?

Experts believe that the government is investigating a large AI (artificial intelligence) model. Meta is looking to run such operations at the local level. Based on an open source large language model, Meta's Llama series is one of the most widely used foundational models by Indian enterprises. It is being used to build applications and improve trend models on proprietary data.

Neel Shah, partner at technology research firm Counterpoint Research, said Meta aims to build greenfield data centers in key areas including Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Delhi NCR, which can meet its strong infrastructure needs, from fiber to power. Facebook has 314.6 million users in India, while Instagram has 350 million users and WhatsApp has 480 million users. The number of users in India is almost double that of Mark Zuckerberg's native America.

India's global share is 3 percent

India's data center industry capacity is expected to double in the next three years, Carriage Ratings has said in a research. Currently, despite generating 20 percent of global data, India's global share of data center capacity is only 3 percent. However, this is likely to change with major tech companies like Meta and Google considering localizing data storage in India. Last week, media reports said Alphabet Inc's Google is in talks to buy 22.5 acres of land in Navi Mumbai to build its first captive data center in the country.