After cool reception of GPT-5 and growing pressures on training, computing and infrastructure costs, Openai sees India as the 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: “India’s AI adoption is amazing – Chatgpt users have grown 4x over the past year – and we are excited to invest more in India!”
According to Altman, India has become Openai’s second largest market in Chatgpt, lagging only behind the United States. To attract local users, the company has launched Chatgpt Go with a monthly subscription of $5, as a budget-friendly Plus and Pro Tiers alternative ($20 and $200 per month, respectively). Chatgpt Go sells to students and businesses, promising access to advanced features such as longer context memory, higher usage restrictions and advanced tools such as editing custom GPTS to build AI tools that suit specific user needs.
Altman has visited India several times in recent years, including a 2023 meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where he praised the country’s rapid adoption of AI, saying that it “all elements can become a global leader in artificial intelligence.” In June, Openai deepened its ties with the country through a partnership with the Indian government’s India Mission, an initiative aimed at expanding access to AI nationwide.
But competitors are also circling in the market. Google and Meta already operate major AI products and R&D hubs in India, while confusing AI founded by Indian entrepreneur Aravind Srinivas is seeing explosive growth. In the second quarter of 2025, Confused’s monthly active users in India increased by 640% year-on-year, far exceeding Chatgpt’s 350% growth over the same period. Chatgpt positions itself as a conversation assistant, but is confused by its tools as an AI-driven search engine, which provides cited answers that combine its own search capabilities with OpenAI and Anthropic models.
In April, both OpenAI and Confusion launched WhatsApp Bot globally, aiming to integrate AI-powered chat and search into daily messaging. This move may be key given WhatsApp’s ubiquity in India. “In flight, the confusion on WhatsApp is a super convenient way to use AI. Flight WiFi supports messaging apps best. And WhatsApp has made a significant optimization for this as it grew to support connectivity in a country that is not the best,” Srinivas wrote on LinkedIn in May.
Over the past year, Openai has been steadily expanding its global footprint, with offices increasing in London, Dublin, Paris, Brussels, Munich, Tokyo and Singapore. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and also has U.S. offices in New York and Seattle.
