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OpenAI sets foot in India: Office location, launch date, govt collab | Details
ChatGPT creator OpenAI has incorporated a company in India, with plans to open an office in New Delhi and start hiring soon. Here’s what we know so far.
OpenAI, known for its AI chatbot ChatGPT, is set to open a corporate office in New Delhi by the end of 2025, underscoring India as a key growth market.
The company, cofounded by Silicon Valley billionaire Sam Altman, has started hiring to expand its local team, according to a statement on Friday. OpenAI, at present, has only one employee in India—Pragya Misra, who leads public policy and partnerships in the country.
“India has all the ingredients to become a global AI leader—amazing tech talent, a world-class developer ecosystem, and strong government support through the India AI Mission,” Altman said in the statement. “Opening our first office and building a local team is an important first step in our commitment to make advanced AI more accessible across the country and to build AI for India, and with India.”
A bigger presence and more staff on ground will help OpenAI ramp up partnerships with the government, businesses and developers in the country of 1.4 billion for its tech talent.
Here’s what we know so far about OpenAI’s India plans.
1. The India Push
India is ChatGPT’s largest international market, second only to its home country of the United States, and one of the fastest growing. That’s underscored by the four-fold jump in weekly active users in the past one year alone. Moreover, India has the largest population of students on ChatGPT worldwide.
What’s also interesting is the fact India ranks among the Top 5 developer markets for OpenAI.
2. Made For India
That kind of traffic has prompted OpenAI to launch ChatGPT Go—an India-only subscription plan priced at ₹399/month with integrated UPI payments. It allows users to send messages and generate images up to 10 times more than the free version.
There are two more subscription tiers—ChatGPT Pro at ₹19,900/month and ChatGPT Plus at ₹1,999/month—that offer priority access, faster turnaround, and higher usage limits for heavy users.
3. AI For India
Altman has announced an OpenAI Academy for India—an AI literacy program in partnership with the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. That ChatGPT’s GPT-5 model understands Indian languages way better now ties into this initiative.
For students, the biggest cohort of ChatGPT users in India, OpenAI has launched the Study Mode that gives personalised responses, interactive questioning, and step-by-step instruction to encourage learning and understanding.
4. Built In India
Apart from setting up an office in New Delhi, OpenAI plans to host its first Education Summit in India later in August and its first Developer Day later this year. That will bring together students, developers, startups and enterprises building AI for India.
5. India For AI
According to Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, OpenAI's decision to “establish a presence in India reflects the country's growing leadership in digital innovation and AI adoption". The government also announced its collaboration with OpenAI for its India AI Mission to tap into the country’s tech talent and developer ecosystem.
A similar mission was announced by MeitY with Sarvam AI. The AI startup, founded by Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan, is developing LLMs for Indian languages and use cases under the India AI Mission. Its applications include content creation, language translation, chatbots, text summarisation, sentiment analysis, and educational tools—all tailored for Indian languages.
It remains to be seen how OpenAI and Sarvam AI collaborate on this front.
To be sure, the competition to capture India’s AI market—Perplexity AI is on offer for free with every Airtel connection—is of strategic importance and goes beyond revenue. India’s untapped data-guzzling population feeds the LLMs of OpenAI and its ilk to generate solutions in countless languages.
