Adani, Jabil sign MoU for 50:50 venture to make AI data centre hardware in India

Adani Enterprises and Jabil Inc., the US electronics manufacturing services company based in St. Petersburg, Florida, said on Tuesday, 13 October 2026 that they have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MoU) to form a 50:50 joint venture that would make AI and data centre hardware in India. According to the companies, the venture would manufacture and assemble AI racks, servers, storage and networking equipment, along with the power and cooling gear that large data centres need, and aims to build a multi-gigawatt AI infrastructure manufacturing platform in the country. The joint venture still depends on definitive agreements, regulatory approvals and customary conditions, and no investment amount, factory location or timeline has been made public.

India's data centre build-out has so far depended heavily on imported equipment. Servers, racks and cooling systems are usually built overseas and shipped in, even when the buildings, land and power are Indian. A domestic joint venture that assembles this hardware at scale would move a larger share of the spending on each data centre into Indian factories. That matters for the trade balance, for supply-chain security and for jobs in electronics manufacturing.

For the Adani Group, the deal is a step up the value chain. Gautam Adani, the group's chairman, said the partnership would take the group beyond powering and hosting AI infrastructure into manufacturing the systems that advanced computing runs on. The group already has large stakes in power generation, transmission and data centres; the group has said it plans to invest about $100 billion in green-powered, AI-ready data centres with around five gigawatts of capacity by 2035. Owning the hardware supply chain as well would let the group offer customers a more complete package.

For Jabil, which already builds cloud and AI data centre equipment for global customers, India offers a fast-growing market for the same kind of equipment, close to where new data centres are being built. Jabil's chief executive Mike Dastoor described the MoU as the next step in the companies' shared effort to build a scaled AI infrastructure manufacturing platform in India, and said India would matter more for both domestic and global AI infrastructure demand.

There is an important limit to keep in mind. The venture is about the racks, servers and supporting electrical and cooling systems, not the AI chips inside them. Graphics processors and other accelerators will still come from global chip companies. The value added in India would come from system integration, power and cooling, which are a large share of a modern AI data centre's cost but not the most advanced part of it.

Short-term: Nothing changes on the factory floor yet. The MoU is non-binding, so the next milestones to watch are a definitive agreement, the choice of a plant site and an investment figure. Investors in Adani Enterprises will weigh how much capital the venture needs.

Long-term: If it goes ahead, India could gain a large domestic source of AI data centre hardware, cutting import dependence and lowering lead times for data centre operators. It could also position India as an export base for AI racks to other markets.

Who is affected: Data centre operators and cloud providers in India, electronics component suppliers and contract manufacturers, engineers and technicians in hardware assembly, and investors in Adani Enterprises and Jabil.

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