ChatGPT Builds a “South Asia HQ”? OpenAI Makes a Major Push Into India

TradingKey - OpenAI has officially registered a legal entity in India and announced the opening of its first office in New Delhi, marking the start of local hiring and signaling a deep strategic commitment to the Indian market. This move goes beyond serving a large user base — it reflects OpenAI’s intent to strengthen commercial penetration and policy engagement through localized operations.

India has emerged as ChatGPT’s second-largest market globally, with the highest number of student users worldwide. Weekly active users continue to grow, reflecting strong engagement and significant potential in education and productivity use cases. To improve accessibility, OpenAI is developing a low-cost subscription plan tailored for the Indian market, aiming to boost adoption and cultivate long-term ARPU growth. Recently, CEO Sam Altman stated that India is now OpenAI’s second-largest market after the U.S. — and could soon become its largest.

The New Delhi office will focus on three key priorities:

1. Enhancing multilingual support and localized prompt engineering to improve user experience across India’s diverse linguistic landscape.
2. Strengthening collaboration with the Indian government and academic institutions, including participation in national AI initiatives such as IndiaAI, to support responsible innovation and regulatory alignment.
3. Expanding enterprise and developer ecosystems, accelerating API commercialization. OpenAI has already begun hiring locally and plans to position India as a strategic hub for global developer outreach.

Challenges AheadThe expansion is not without hurdles. Copyright disputes, training data compliance, and data security regulations remain potential risks. Establishing a local team will help build direct channels with regulators, but sustained investment in data governance and transparency will be critical.

OpenAI’s entry is set to reshape India’s tech landscape. In the short term, it will generate high-skilled jobs and drive demand for cloud infrastructure. Over the medium to long term, it could catalyze innovation in edtech, enterprise AI, and startups. OpenAI’s localized strategy may also force competitors like Google and Perplexity to accelerate their own India-specific offerings, ushering in a new era of service refinement and pricing competition in the market.