Is Ambani the Real Winner in Adani’s Mega Solar Mission?

Gautam Adani has just delivered the year’s biggest energy shocker.

In the blistering white expanse of Khavda in Gujarat—where the desert heat blurs the horizon and engineering meets its toughest test—Adani Green Energy has awarded a ₹1,381-crore contract along with a five-year strategic partnership to Sterling and Wilson Renewable Energy (SWREL).

The development is striking for one reason:
SWREL is nearly 40% owned by Reliance Industries, led by Mukesh Ambani.

This isn’t a symbolic handshake or a softening of a long-standing rivalry. It’s a strategic alignment born out of necessity, delivered through a purchase order instead of a press conference. As Jayant Mundhra first highlighted, the move carries the narrative weight of a series finale — bold, calculated, and rooted in competitive logic.

Adani is building the world’s largest 30GW renewable energy park — an undertaking so vast that its geometry will eventually appear on satellite dashboards. And to execute it, he has turned to a company backed by his biggest business adversary.

This is India’s green-energy transition revealing its next chapter — where speed, scale and terrain ultimately outrank rivalry.

A Rivalry Tested by the Desert

The relationship between the Adani and Ambani groups has rarely been warm. After Reliance acquired its stake in SWREL in late 2021, Adani Green’s contracts to the company stopped almost instantly. A quiet, businesslike distance settled between the two empires, already competing across energy, infrastructure, telecom and capital markets.

Then came Khavda — and Khavda changed the equation.

The site is not a routine solar installation. It is a logistical and engineering crucible:

• No natural water source
• No existing infrastructure for hundreds of kilometres
• Salt-laden winds that corrode equipment
• Harsh temperature swings
• Labour forces surviving in off-grid camps

Adani has committed to global investors that he will deliver 30GW of capacity, a feat never attempted in terrain this hostile. Ambition alone cannot lay foundations or mobilise supply chains.

Execution is what matters — and one company already understood the land.

SWREL has delivered ~6GW of solar capacity in the same region for NTPC. It has the ground data, the logistics, the labour systems and the operational footprint already in place. Rebuilding these capacities from scratch would cost Adani time he simply does not have.

He faced a clear choice:

• Bring in a neutral contractor and lose up to 12 months in acclimatisation
• Or hire the competitor who has already mapped the desert

Adani chose speed over sentiment. In Khavda’s harsh landscape, physics won where diplomacy never could.

Ambani’s Quiet but Decisive Value Chain Win

If Adani acted out of necessity, Ambani benefits out of strategy.

Reliance is preparing for its own green-energy launch between 2026 and 2027, complete with giga-factories spanning solar modules, storage, and hydrogen. With SWREL embedded inside Adani’s flagship renewable project, Ambani secures two major advantages:

1. Revenue Without Reconciliation

A significant share of Adani’s renewable capex now flows into a Reliance-linked company.
The rivalry remains intact, but the revenue pipeline strengthens.

2. R&D Without Risk

SWREL will solve Khavda’s toughest scaling problems using Adani’s capital.
The learnings — logistical efficiencies, terrain modelling, execution strategies — flow naturally to Reliance’s upcoming giga-projects in the same region.

Simply put:
Adani funds the learning curve. Ambani accelerates the future.

It is a textbook value-chain move: efficient, quiet, and exceptionally effective.

Two Titans, One Desert, Intersecting Ambitions

This partnership is not a peace pact.
It is a functional ceasefire, shaped by scale on one side and strategic reach on the other.

• Adani needs scale.
  He targets 45GW by 2030 and can’t afford delays.

• Ambani needs ecosystem dominance.
  Not just energy production, but the entire green-energy value chain.

The rivalry continues — in government tenders, consumer markets, supply-chain control and investor mindshare. But for now, in the vast white desert of Kutch, the two most influential names in Indian business find themselves aligned by purpose.

Adani builds the plant.
Ambani builds the builder.

In an economy pushing aggressively toward clean energy, this moment marks a new phase: competitive collaboration shaped not by goodwill, but by scale, speed and national stakes.

Crazy? Perhaps.
But it is also the shape of the new India—where ambition outpaces rivalry, and the future is built in the sands of Khavda.

This story draws inspiration from Jayant Mundhra’s original LinkedIn analysis, with due credit.