OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Thursday announced the launch of the ‘OpenAI for India’ initiative, aimed at developing local infrastructure, skills and partnerships to build “AI with India, for India, and in India”.
Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Altman said the programme seeks to expand access to artificial intelligence and support its economic and social applications in the country.
According to the company, India already has more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users across students, educators, developers and entrepreneurs. The new initiative, it said, will build on this adoption by collaborating with partners — starting with the Tata Group — to develop sovereign AI capabilities, accelerate enterprise usage and invest in workforce upskilling.
As part of its global Stargate initiative, OpenAI and the Tata Group will develop AI-ready data centre capacity in India to meet data residency, security and compliance requirements. OpenAI will become the first customer of Tata Consultancy Services’ HyperVault data centre business, beginning with 100 megawatts of capacity, scalable to 1 gigawatt over time.
“India is already leading the way in AI adoption… and is well placed to help shape how democratic AI is adopted at scale,” Altman said.
The local infrastructure is expected to allow OpenAI’s advanced models to operate within India with lower latency and support mission-critical and government workloads.
Calling the partnership a milestone for the country’s AI ambitions, Tata Sons Chairman N. Chandrasekaran said it would help create advanced domestic AI infrastructure and support industry transformation and workforce skilling.
The Tata Group also plans to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise across its workforce in phases, starting with hundreds of thousands of TCS employees — one of the largest enterprise AI deployments globally. TCS additionally intends to use OpenAI’s Codex for AI-native software development across teams.
-IANS
