The Jio Platforms NSE IPO double-header, with both companies filing draft prospectuses within days of each other last month, is not just about raising capital. It is a report card on how profoundly India has changed in a decade.
Jio Platforms, the digital arm of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, is expected to raise around $4 billion (£3.02bn) at an estimated valuation of $120-160 billion. The National Stock Exchange (NSE), the world’s largest derivatives exchange, is reportedly offering 6% equity for $3.3 billion, valuing the bourse at $57 billion. Together, the two offerings could rank among the largest public issues India has ever seen.
What the Jio Platforms NSE IPO filings actually reveal
Look beyond the headline valuations and the structural detail is revealing. Moneycontrol reported that Jio’s draft red herring prospectus (DRHP), approved by the board on 19 June 2026 per Livemint, earmarks approximately ₹27,500 crore of net proceeds for prepayment of borrowings. That is a balance-sheet repair job as much as a growth play. Net debt had already fallen sharply, from ₹48,440 crore in March 2024 to ₹27,579 crore as of March 2026, while cash balances more than quintupled over the same period to ₹16,947 crore.
The NSE’s filing tells a different story. According to the New Indian Express, the IPO is structured entirely as an offer-for-sale of up to 148,905,525 shares, with selling shareholders including State Bank of India, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and General Insurance Corporation of India, among others. No fresh capital enters the exchange’s treasury. The Economic Times put the IPO size at around ₹30,000 crore, which would make it the largest public issue in Indian history. NSE first applied to SEBI for a listing on 18 October 2016, making this journey more than a decade in the making.
That decade-long delay was not accidental. The exchange had to file a settlement application with SEBI as recently as June 2025 to resolve the co-location and dark fibre cases, agreeing to pay approximately ₹1,400 crore. It had already made a provision of ₹1,297 crore in its November 2025 financials, over and above ₹100 crore already deposited with SEBI following a Securities Appellate Tribunal order in 2023. The governance clouds have not entirely cleared; they have been monetised away. Whether that is reassuring or merely pragmatic depends on your appetite for institutional trust.
Jio’s AI pivot and what it means for the valuation
Jio is also doing something more ambitious than tidying its balance sheet. It is repositioning itself as India’s AI infrastructure backbone. Reliance Industries’ own press release confirmed a partnership with Meta Platforms to develop an AI-enabled data centre in Jamnagar, Gujarat, where Meta will lease 168 megawatts of capacity in its first built-to-suit data centre arrangement in India. Separately, NVIDIA’s newsroom confirmed a collaboration to develop India’s own foundation large language model, trained on the country’s diverse languages, using NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips and DGX Cloud infrastructure.
The ambition is clear. Whether it justifies a valuation of up to $160 billion for a company that remains, at its core, a mobile network operator, is where the IPO pricing debate will be sharpest.
Yatin Singh, CEO of Investment Banking at Emkay Global, framed the listings in generational terms, telling the BBC: ‘These are unique businesses which don’t get built often. NSE is a direct proxy of the “financialisation” of Indian household savings into mutual funds and stocks, while Jio is the story of a company that single handedly ushered in a digital revolution, becoming a driving factor for several new-age Indian businesses.’
He is right that the underlying businesses are formidable. Jio alone accounts for 525 million internet subscribers in a country where barely 200 million people were online a decade ago. The NSE sits at the centre of a $4.85 trillion equity market. These are not speculative ventures; they are utilities wrapped in growth narratives.
The risk, as Feroze Azeez of Anand Rathi Wealth Limited put it plainly, is valuation: ‘Even high-quality businesses can deliver disappointing returns if they are issued at overly aggressive valuations.’ India’s markets have been among the worst performers globally over the past year, with foreign investors pulling billions in search of AI-driven returns elsewhere in Asia. A weakening currency has compounded that.
The listings will not turn that tide by themselves. But if the pricing is disciplined, the Jio Platforms NSE IPO pairing could give global capital a reason to look again at India’s new economy. The question is whether the Ambanis and the NSE’s selling shareholders are willing to leave enough on the table to make that case.
