Reliance Jio, the telecom giant controlled by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, is now offering its cloud PC service to any internet user in India, pitching it as a way to convert aging computers into AI-ready machines without buying new hardware.
On Wednesday, the company widened access to JioPC, a service first launched in July 2025. Previously limited to Jio’s own broadband customers, it is now available as a stand-alone subscription to anyone with an internet connection, regardless of their telecom or broadband provider. The service streams a virtual PC from Jio’s cloud to an existing computer, with plans offering up to eight virtual CPUs, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage.
How JioPC works and what it costs
Jio says the service can deliver the computing power needed for modern AI applications to computers as old as eight years, without users replacing their machines or adding new components. By shifting most processing and storage from the device into its data centers, the company can keep expanding capacity while the hardware on a user’s desk stays the same.
Pricing starts at ₹1,000 (about EUR 10) for two months. A 12-month subscription runs ₹4,000 (around EUR 36) for 8GB of RAM and 500GB of storage, or ₹5,000 (about EUR 46) for the configuration with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
A large installed base and longer replacement cycles
India had more than 65 million PCs in use in 2025, including roughly 34 million consumer and 31 million commercial machines, according to IDC estimates. The research firm expects the installed base to approach 69 million by the end of 2026.
The timing coincides with lengthening replacement cycles. Consumers and small businesses in India now typically replace PCs every five to six years, up from four to five years in 2022, IDC senior market analyst Bharath Shenoy said. Enterprises are also holding onto machines longer, with replacement cycles reaching about four years, compared with three previously.
Jio is betting that cloud computing can extend those lifecycles even further, allowing users to pay for computing capability rather than repeatedly upgrading hardware.
Adoption hurdles in a hardware-first market
Prabhu Ram, vice president of the industry research group at Gurugram-based CyberMedia Research, said the service could create a market centered on paying for capability instead of hardware. “Jio is broadening its value proposition by opening JioPC to non-Jio users, while also challenging the traditional hardware upgrade cycle,” Ram said.
He does not expect the model to replace conventional PCs, but sees it forming a parallel, price-sensitive tier for households, students, and others “for whom buying a new AI-capable PC was never really on the table to begin with.”
Indian buyers have traditionally preferred owning hardware over paying for a PC as a service, Shenoy said, meaning Jio must convince users that a recurring subscription is worth giving up certain advantages, including the ability to keep working offline. That trade-off could be especially significant in smaller cities and towns, where affordable computing has the most room to grow but stable internet is not guaranteed. JioPC also faces competition at the low end from refurbished PCs, which let consumers own inexpensive hardware outright.
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