Asia In Brief India’s top telco Reliance Jio , which boasts over 460 million subscribers, will soon introduce a cloud PC.

Company chair Akash M Ambani on Saturday revealed the plan at Mumbai Tech Week. He said the device would be device-agnostic and require a user-provided screen.

Reliance Jio became India’s top mobile telco by creating its own handsets and selling them at very low prices, along with bundles of data and content. Similar offers from rivals have seen mobile phones become ubiquitous in India. Many are feature phones capable of running apps, but smartphones are also becoming highly prevalent. In November 2024 the nation’s telco regulator counted 896 million wireless subscriptions, 475 million at Reliance Jio alone.

The nation’s PC market is tiny by comparison: analyst firm IDC recently reported Q3 2024 sales of 4.49 million PCs. That number was a record but was also just 6.5 percent of the 68.8 million machines sold around the world in the quarter.

That’s a disproportionately small slice of the global market given India accounts for 18 percent of the world’s population.

If Reliance Jio can bring cloudy PCs to even ten percent of its customer base in a year, it will dramatically change the market.

Ambani didn’t detail when the cloud PCs will debut, but said the tech will scale to serve “hundreds of millions” of potential customers and be keenly-priced like the company’s other services and able to serve. He also said developers will be able to target the cloud PC platform, under terms that see them charged “less than 30 percent” to have their wares sold through a Jio service.

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