Mukesh-Ambani owned Reliance Jio announced a cloud tie-up with Google on Thursday to boost the telecom firm's 5G push. Reliance will shift its core retail businesses to Google Cloud's infrastructure to power the internet needs of Reliance Retail, JioMart, JioSaavn, and JioHealth.

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"Reliance Jio will use Google Cloud's cutting-edge technologies to power Jio's 5G solutions," Reliance MD Mukesh Ambani told shareholders in the annual general meeting on Thursday.

Google, which last year invested $4.5 billion in Jio's parent Jio Platforms, said it would help India's biggest wireless carrier with tech solutions for its enterprise and consumer offerings as it plans to launch 5G services.

The tie-up lends Jio the expertise of a global tech giant as it expands digital services to small and medium businesses as well as hundreds of millions of individuals. And it gives Google the unmatched scale of Reliance, whose businesses range from oil to telecoms and e-commerce.

Jio established a 10-year alliance with Microsoft in 2019, aiming to build data centres across India that will be hosted on its Azure cloud platform in a bid to offer services to the country's booming start-up economy.

Jio disrupted India's telecom market in 2016 when it launched with cut-price data plans and free voice services. It forced several competitors out of the market and is now India's biggest mobile carrier with more than 425 million customers.

On Thursday, Ambani said Jio, which also counts Facebook, Qualcomm and Intel among its backers, was confident of being the first to launch 5G services in India.

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