Artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI, at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, has unveiled its most strategic expansion in the country, with the launch of OpenAI for India initiative. This will encompass investments to partner the build up of India’s sovereign AI infrastructure, enterprise AI adoption and ups killing initiatives through education partnerships. It also announces India’s crucial role in the global Stargate project, a $500 billion AI infrastructure project announced in 2025, with the aim to establishing US dominance for AI by 2029.
“India is already leading the way in AI adoption, and with its homegrown tech talent, optimism about what AI can do for the country, and strong government support, it is well placed to help shape its future and how democratic AI is adopted at scale,” says Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. The company says India now has more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users, across the students, teachers, developers and entrepreneurs demographics.
It also remains to be seen whether plugging India as a node into the Stargate Project, aimed to cement US leadership in AI over the next few years, is a step towards speeding up that aspiration, or whether AI diffusion, that is accelerating the availability of AI, the key objective. The two narratives may sit uneasily in the real world. OpenAI’s approach assumes alignment. But geopolitical recalibration, trade policy changes or domestic policy shifts could complicate things.
“OpenAI for India builds on that momentum, working with leading partners—beginning with Tata Group—to build sovereign AI capabilities, accelerate enterprise adoption, invest in workforce up-skilling, and strengthen India’s thriving AI ecosystem,” the company says, in a statement. The reference to Tata Group specifically has dual pronged importance, for hardware as well as enterprise collaboration as part of OpenAI for India.
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OpenAI and Tata Group will partner to develop local, AI-ready data centre capacity, with specific focus on data residency, security as well as long-term domestic capability value. There is specific focus on the former, considering AI sovereignty and questions about AI data safeguarding measures, are at the forefront of conversations at the summit. OpenAI says they will become the first customer of Tata Consultancy Services’ HyperVault data center business, beginning with 100 megawatts of capacity and with potential to scale to 1 gigawatt over time.
“Through OpenAI for India, we’re working together to build the infrastructure, skills, and local partnerships needed to build AI with India, for India, and in India,” Altman adds.
Globally, data centre capacity remains concentrated. The US has 5,300 data centres with an installed capacity of 54 gigawatts, while China operates with 20 gigawatts, and Europe clocks 13 gigawatts. India currently has 1.6 gigawatts operational capacity, with a further 1.7 gigawatts expected to be ready by 2027, and expansion expected to as much as 10 gigawatts by 2030. Industry estimates suggest India’s data center market has attracted nearly $94 billion in investments since 2019. TCS’ HyperVault is being built by the wholly-owned subsidiary HyperVault AI Data Center Limited, established in October last year.
HyperVault aims to build over 1 GW of data center capacity in India over the next 5–7 years. They secured a $1 billion investment from global asset manager TPG last year, and this month, announced a partnership with chipmaker AMD to deploy the Helios platform, a rack-scale AI architecture using Instinct MI455X GPUs and EPYC “Venice” CPUs, to support sovereign AI factories in India.
“This infrastructure will enable OpenAI’s most advanced models to run securely in India, delivering lower latency while meeting data residency, security, and compliance requirements for mission-critical and government workloads,” OpenAI says, in a statement.
While the approach seems clear, a key concern remains is that while models may run locally and data may be stored locally, most popular models remain proprietary. India’s AI governance approach is still evolving, but the sovereignty requirements are becoming clearer.
Enterprise and education focus
The OpenAI for India initiative will see the AI company expand OpenAI Certifications in India, with TCS becoming the first partner organisation outside of the US region. “These certifications are designed to help professionals build practical AI skills that apply across roles and industries,” the description suggests.
OpenAI also says they are now enabling education partnerships with leading educational institutions in the country — at the centre of this is that they are providing more than 100,000 ChatGPT Edu licenses to these institutions. Some officially mentioned illustrations are Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, and the Pearl Academy.
What is not clear is whether it is purely a license sharing exercise, and therefore potentially short term or limited exposure to AI tools, or whether there will be larger curriculum changes as well as AI integration within the study flows. Secondly, OpenAI hasn’t said if Indian universities will gain access to research-grade model capabilities.
Details remain awaited on whether this initiative expands to institutions in India’s tier-2 and smaller towns. Without structural integration into India’s public university system, there are risks this exercise becomes a top-tier institutional enhancement rather than nationwide AI capacity building.
It is a similar methodology being applied to expand enterprise usage, with company partnerships to enable usage of ChatGPT Enterprise within workflows and teams. OpenAI says that the “Tata Group plans to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise across its employees over the next several years, starting with hundreds of thousands of TCS employees, making it one of the largest enterprise AI deployments in the world.”
This adds to recent partnerships in India, including streaming platform JioHotstar, quick commerce and food delivery company Eternal, payment system Pine Labs, automobile e-commerce platform Cars24, IT consultancy HCLTech, fintechs PhonePe and CRED, as well as online travel aggregator MakeMyTrip.
It is clear OpenAI sees India’s 100 million weekly user numbers as a milestone, but key now would be not just more numbers, but user value collection and monetisation.
