JioPC opens cloud PCs to all Indian internet users

An eight-year-old computer on an Indian desk can now reach the computing power Jio says is needed for modern AI applications without a hardware upgrade. On Wednesday, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio opened JioPC to any internet user in India, not only customers of its own broadband service.

JioPC streams a virtual PC from Jio’s cloud to an existing computer. Much of the processing and storage happens in Jio’s data centers rather than on the device, with plans offering up to eight virtual CPUs, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The service costs ₹1,000 for two months at the entry level. A 12-month subscription costs ₹4,000 for 8GB of RAM and 500GB of storage, or ₹5,000 for the 16GB and 1TB configuration.

The backdrop is a large and aging installed base. IDC estimates that India had more than 65 million PCs in use in 2025, including consumer and commercial machines, and expects the total to approach 69 million by the end of 2026. Bharath Shenoy, IDC’s senior market analyst, told TechCrunch that consumers and small businesses now replace PCs every five to six years, compared with four to five years in 2022. Enterprise replacement cycles have reached about four years, up from three previously.

Jio is trying to stretch that cycle further, but the model has a hard dependency: a stable internet connection. Bharath Shenoy says Indians have traditionally preferred owning hardware, while refurbished PCs offer another way to buy inexpensive machines without relying on connectivity. Prabhu Ram of Gurugram-based CyberMedia Research sees JioPC as a possible parallel tier for households, students and other price-sensitive users, rather than a replacement for conventional PCs.

So, concretely, JioPC gives people who already have an internet connection a way to postpone buying a new computer while accessing more cloud capacity, including for modern AI applications. The unresolved question is whether users will treat that capacity as a daily utility or as a workaround. Jio’s published specifications also do not mention dedicated AI accelerators for on-device generative AI workloads, so its cloud-based “AI-ready” pitch is challenging the usual definition of an AI PC rather than reproducing it.