After a cooler-than-expected reception to GPT-5 and mounting pressure from rising training, compute and infrastructure costs, OpenAI is looking to India as a cornerstone of its global expansion strategy. On Friday, CEO Sam Altman announced on X that the company will open its first office in New Delhi later this year. He also said he plans to visit the country next month, writing, “A.I. adoption in India has been amazing to watch—ChatGPT users grew 4x in the past year—and we are excited to invest much more in India!”
India has become OpenAI’s second largest market for ChatGPT, trailing only the U.S., according to Altman. To appeal to local users, the company has rolled out ChatGPT Go, a $5 per month subscription pitched as a budget-friendly alternative to the Plus and Pro tiers ($20 and $200 per month, respectively). Marketed toward students and enterprises, ChatGPT Go promises access to premium features such as longer context memory, higher usage limits and advanced tools like editing custom GPTs to build A.I. tools tailored to specific user needs.
Altman has visited India multiple times in recent years, including a 2023 meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where he praised the country’s rapid adoption of A.I., saying it has “all the ingredients to become a global A.I. leader.” In June, OpenAI deepened its ties to the country by partnering with the Indian government’s IndiaAI Mission, an initiative to expand A.I. access nationwide.
But rivals are also circling the market. Google and Meta already operate major A.I. products and R&D hubs in India, while Perplexity AI, founded by Indian entrepreneur Aravind Srinivas, is seeing explosive growth. Perplexity’s monthly active users in India jumped 640 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2025, far outpacing ChatGPT’s 350 percent growth in the same period. While ChatGPT positions itself as a conversational assistant, Perplexity markets its tool as an A.I.-powered search engine that delivers cited answers, blending its own retrieval-augmented system with models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
In April, both OpenAI and Perplexity launched WhatsApp bots globally, aiming to integrate A.I.-powered chat and search into everyday messaging. Given WhatsApp’s ubiquity in India, the move could prove pivotal. “Perplexity on WhatsApp is super convenient way to use A.I. when in a flight. Flight WiFi supports messaging apps the best. And WhatsApp has been heavily optimized for this because it grew to support countries where connectivity wasn’t the best,” Srinivas wrote on LinkedIn in May.
OpenAI has been steadily expanding its global footprint, adding offices in London, Dublin, Paris, Brussels, Munich, Tokyo and Singapore over the past year. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and also maintains U.S. offices in New York and Seattle.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
