AI majors are lining up to offer free access to their pro plans in India. After Perplexity started the trend, OpenAI followed suit recently, and now Google has announced a major partnership with Reliance Jio (India’s largest telecom company) to bring its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) services to millions of users in India, for free. As part of the collaboration, Reliance Jio subscribers will get 18 months of free access to Google’s Gemini AI Pro plan, a premium subscription worth ₹35,100 (~ $399).
The plan includes access to Gemini 2.5 Pro, the tech giant’s latest AI model capable of understanding and generating text, images, and videos. The offer will first roll out to Jio’s 5G users aged between 18 and 25, with a nationwide expansion planned soon after.
The Sundar Pichai-led company seems to be copying rival Perplexity, and OpenAI, both of which recently started to offer premium Perplexity Pro and Chat GPT Go plans for free for a year. Perplexity’s plan, normally priced at around ₹17,000 annually, is being made available to Airtel’s 360 million users as part of the partnership. The scenario becomes even more interesting as Google holds investments in both of India’s biggest telecom rivals, Jio and Airtel, with a $4.5 billion stake in Jio Platforms (~ 7.73%) and a $700 million stake in Bharti Airtel (~ 1.2%).
Meanwhile, under this Gemini AI Pro plan, users will have access to Gemini 2.5 Pro through the Gemini app, NotebookLM (the firm’s AI-powered research and writing assistant) and improved creative tools like Veo 3.1 for video generation and Nano Banana for image creation. The package also offers 2 terabytes (TB) of cloud storage across Google Drive, Gmail, and Photos, as well as for WhatsApp backups on Android devices. According to the companies, activation for the free AI plan will take place through the MyJio app.
Reliance plans to gradually expand the program to cover all Jio customers on active 5G data plans (potentially reaching tens of millions of users). Notably, with Jio’s massive base of over 450 million subscribers, this is expected to be one of the largest consumer rollouts of AI services anywhere in the world. The collaboration is not limited to consumers. Reliance’s AI division, Reliance Intelligence Limited, will work with Google Cloud to build advanced AI infrastructure in India. This will include the use of Google’s powerful Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), which are special chips designed to train and run large AI models.
The timing of this latest move becomes even more noteworthy since, just last week, Google’s biggest rival in the AI space, OpenAI, announced that it will offer one year of free access to its paid ChatGPT Go plan for all users in India.
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