Google has announced a strategic partnership with Reliance Intelligence to offer its AI Pro plan to Jio Unlimited 5G plan users at no extra cost for 18 months. The move escalates competition with rivals like OpenAI, which recently announced its own free-tier promotion for the Indian market.
The offer includes Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro model, as well as image and video generation capabilities with the Nano Banana and Veo 3.1 models, expanded access to NotebookLM, and 2 TB of cloud storage. The combined value is approximately ₹35,100. The rollout will begin with users aged 18 to 25 before extending to all eligible Jio users nationwide.
A challenge to OpenAI
The partnership directly challenges OpenAI, which is offering its ChatGPT Go subscription free for one year to all users in India, beginning November 4. That promotion was announced as OpenAI opened a new office in New Delhi in August to expand its presence in what is ChatGPT’s second-largest market.
Google’s new partnership builds on its existing momentum in the country. Indian users have already become the world’s leading adopters of Google’s Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) image generator. This popularity drove 15.2 million Gemini app downloads in India through August, surpassing 9.8 million in the United States, and propelled the app to the top of local charts.
