Mukesh Ambani on Infrastructure Building

At age 24 Ambani was handed responsibility for the Patalganga petrochemical plant while Reliance was deepening its oil refining and petrochemicals bet. He subsequently directed construction of the Jamnagar grassroots refinery, which by 2010 could process 660,000 barrels per day and was integrated with petrochemicals, power, ports and supporting infrastructure — the world's largest single-location grassroots refinery at the time.

In December 2013 Ambani flagged a possible digital-infrastructure collaboration with Bharti Airtel for 4G in India, and at the June 2014 AGM committed Rs 1.8 trillion of investment across businesses over three years with 4G broadband services targeted for 2015. The scale of the bet — capital committed before a single rupee of telecom revenue — was unprecedented in Indian corporate history.

India's telecom tower base expanded from 90,000 in 2006 to nearly half a million by 2020, an infrastructural overbuild forced by the surge in subscribers. The capacity proved unexpectedly useful: when Covid lockdown hit in March 2020, India's networks held up better than some European systems, operating at 60-65% of capacity versus typical 85% peaks elsewhere.

Ambani positioned Jio as an all-IP network at a scale no operator had attempted — voice, data and video encapsulated in internet protocol with the world's largest VoLTE system. He pushed back on the assumption that India was a kilobyte or megabyte country, insisting that the customer trials on voice clarity, call-connect time and indoor coverage had to be exhaustive because the architecture was unprecedented.