Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries, arrives to pay his last respect to Indian industrialist Ratan Tata at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) ahead of its cremation in Mumbai on October 10, 2024.
Punit Paranjpepunit Paranjpe | AFP | Getty Images
Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries on Friday announced new partnerships with Google and Meta to accelerate the company’s push into artificial intelligence.
Speaking at an annual shareholders’ meeting on Friday, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani also disclosed ambitions to list Reliance Jio, India’s largest mobile network, in the first half of 2026.
“A decade ago, digital services became a new growth engine for Reliance — the opportunity before us with AI is just as large, if not larger,” Ambani said, as he revealed a new fully owned subsidiary called Reliance Intelligence.
In a pre-recorded video played during the AGM, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Reliance would leverage the internet giant’s AI and cloud computing capabilities to boost innovation across sectors like energy, retail, telecommunications and financial services.
The pair will establish a dedicated cloud region in India, powered by clean energy provided by Reliance Industries and connected through Jio’s network.
Separately, Ambani also announced a new joint venture with Meta to make use of the tech group’s open-source AI models and deliver “sovereign, enterprise-ready AI for India.”
Under the new venture, Reliance Industries and Meta have committed an initial investment of $100 million to capitalize the unit in a ratio of 70% and 30% respectively, the two companies said in a joint statement Friday.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg hailed the partnership as “a key step forward towards ensuring that everyone has access to AI and eventually super intelligence.”
The partnerships signal a deeper push from U.S. tech names into India at a time when the country is seeing significant economic growth. It is not the first time that either Google and Meta has shown an interest in Reliance.
In 2020, Meta invested $5.7 billion into Jio Platforms, which is the parent company of Reliance Jio. Google separately announced a $4.5 billion investment in Jio Platforms that same year.
Jio Platforms owns a number of brands, including its telecommunications business Reliance Jio, which has grown rapidly over the past decade thanks to competitive pricing.
Reliance’s deeper pacts with Google and Meta come at a precarious time for U.S.-India relations. U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed hefty tariffs on India over its purchases of Russian oil.
Charges against Jeffrey Epstein were announced on July 8, 2019 in New York City. Epstein will be charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors.
Stephanie Keith | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon are among those who appeared in partially redacted files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that were released on Friday by Democrats in the House Oversight Committee.
The committee earlier embarked on a probe to evaluate whether the federal government mishandled its case against Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence following a 2022 conviction for recruiting teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.
President Donald Trump had promised voters on the campaign trail that he would release government documents related to Epstein, who was arrested in the summer of 2019 on sex trafficking charges and died in a New York federal prison, reportedly by suicide, before trial.
However, Trump has refused to endorse the release of any Epstein files since returning to the White House in January, and Republicans in Congress have followed his lead, keeping the documents out of the public’s view.
Democrats in the committee on Friday released redacted pages from a new batch of files they obtained through their probe without giving their Republican peers advanced notice. They were rebuked for the move.
In a statement on Friday, the committee said that the batch included 8,544 documents in response to a subpoena in August, and that, “Further review of the documents, which were redacted to protect the identity of victims, is ongoing.”
The latest batch of documents received by the committee from the Justice Department contained itineraries and notes by Epstein memorializing invitations he’d sent, trips he’d planned and meetings he’d booked with tech and business leaders.
Demonstrators gather for a press conference calling for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files outside the United States Captiol on Wednesday September 03, 2025 in Washington, DC.
The Washington Post | The Washington Post | Getty Images
One of the itineraries indicated that Epstein expected Musk to make a trip to his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Dec. 6, 2014, but then asked “is this still happening?”
Musk told Vanity Fair in 2019 that he had visited Epstein’s New York City mansion and that Epstein “tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island,” but the Tesla CEO had declined.
In June, Musk wrote in a post on X, that he thought Trump and his administration were withholding Epstein-related files from the public view in order to protect the president’s reputation.
“Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files,” Musk, who was in the midst of a public spat with the president, wrote at the time. “That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
Trump was mentioned in previously released court documents from the Epstein case, but has not been formally accused of wrongdoing.
Musk started the year leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an effort to slash the size of the federal government and reduce the power of various regulatory agencies. He left DOGE in May, and he and the president proceeded to hurl insults at each other in public over a number of disagreements.
However, Trump and Musk remain close enough that they sat together at a memorial service for Charlie Kirk earlier this month after the right-wing activist was assassinated while speaking at a university in Utah.
The partially redacted files also indicated Epstein had breakfast with Bannon on Feb. 16, 2019, and lunch with investor Peter Thiel on Nov. 27, 2017. Bannon is a long-time Trump ally, and Thiel was a major backer of Trump ahead of the 2016 election who spoke at the Republican National Convention.
The files also mentioned that Epstein booked a “tentative breakfast party” with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, historically a supporter of Democrats, in December 2014.
Musk, Thiel, Bannon and Gates weren’t immediately available for comment.
U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco speaks as Attorney General Merrick Garland looks on after announcing an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment during a press conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, U.S., May 23, 2024.
Ken Cedeno | Reuters
President Donald Trump on Friday demanded that Microsoft fire Lisa Monaco, an executive who served as deputy attorney general during the Biden administration.
The request appeared on Trump’s Truth Social account, which has 10 million followers. It comes one day after former FBI Director James Comey was indicted, days after Trump pushed to prosecute him.
“She is a menace to U.S. National Security, especially given the major contracts that Microsoft has with the United States Government,” Trump wrote in the post. “Because of Monaco’s many wrongful acts, the U.S. Government recently stripped her of all Security Clearances, took away all of her access to National Security Intelligence, and banned her from all Federal Properties.”
Microsoft declined to comment.
Parts of the U.S. government use Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and productivity software. Earlier this month, Microsoft agreed to offer $3.1 billion in savings in one year on cloud services for agencies to use.
Earlier on Friday, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo published an X post about Monaco joining Microsoft. The appointment happened in July, according to Monaco’s LinkedIn profile. The post contained a link to a July article on the University of Chicago law school’s website.
On Thursday, Microsoft said it would cut off cloud-based storage and artificial intelligence subscriptions to a unit of the Israeli military, after investigating a claim that the division had built a system to track Palestinians’ phone calls.
On Monday, Trump is set to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, NBC News reported.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella attended a dinner alongside other technology executives at the White House earlier this month.
Shares of Electronic Arts closed up 15% on Friday following a report in the Wall Street Journal that the video game company is nearing a roughly $50 billion deal to go private.
Investors including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Silver Lake could announce the deal as soon as next week, the report said. PIF has been pouring billions of dollars into gaming, purchasing the makers of Pokemon Go and the parent company behind Monopoly Go, for example.
Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners is another participating investor, according to a source familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private.
The deal would be the largest leveraged buyout in Wall Street history, surpassing the agreement to take TXU Energy private for about $45 billion in 2007. A leveraged buyout (LBO) is when debt is predominately used for an acquisition, a tactic traditionally used by private equity firms or activists.
EA makes popular video games including The Sims, Madden NFL, the soccer game FC, formerly known as FIFA. With Friday’s gains, the stock is up about 32% for the year.
EA did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.