Sam Altman is bullish about India. The co-founder of OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, says the country’s adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has been “unmatched anywhere in the world”. India is already OpenAI’s second-largest market by number of users and could soon be its biggest. In August OpenAI launched a cheaper version of its chatbot tailored for Indian users. It plans to open an office in New Delhi later this year. Mr Altman is himself due to visit India at the end of this month. According to Bloomberg, a news organisation, he may use the trip to unveil plans to open a mammoth data centre there.
Other tech firms are just as keen. In January Microsoft, which is also an investor in OpenAI, pledged to spend $3bn over the next few years expanding its AI infrastructure in India. In August Google and Meta both announced partnerships with Reliance Industries, the conglomerate run by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, to build data centres and push the use of AI in Indian businesses. In July Perplexity, a startup hoping to dent Google’s dominance in search, made the boldest move: it struck a deal with Bharti Airtel, one of India’s biggest telecoms firms, to provide its AI service (usually $240 a year) free for a year to all 360m Airtel customers. According to Sensor Tower, a market-intelligence firm, downloads of Perplexity in India soared by almost 800% month-on-month after the Airtel tie-up, compared with gains of 39% and 6% for ChatGPT and Gemini….
For Indians, the battle promises cutting-edge AI tools at extremely low cost. For AI firms, the payoff may lie less in revenue than in reach: the chance to lock in hundreds of millions of users, and the torrents of data they create.
AI is erupting in India.
— Prasanna Viswanathan (@prasannavishy) September 17, 2025
The country’s adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has been “unmatched anywhere in the world”.https://t.co/9hDMibOBtj
