OpenAI is moving into India with a New Delhi office later this year after registering a local entity and starting to hire, a push aimed squarely at its second-largest user base.
The company has just introduced its lowest-priced monthly plan in the country at ₹399 (around $4.60) to increase adoption.
That pricing lands days before the office announcement and shows the playbook: win on reach, then build locally. Weekly active users in India have quadrupled in the past year, driven largely by students. I see a race for scale first, revenue later.
“Opening our first office and building a local team is an important first step in our commitment to make advanced AI more accessible across the country and to build AI for India, and with India,” said CEO Sam Altman.
The firm says the India team will deepen ties with government, developers, universities and businesses, and it plans an Education Summit this month and a Developer Day in the country later this year.
OpenAI has been laying the groundwork for months. It hired Pragya Misra (ex-Truecaller, Meta) to lead public policy and partnerships, and brought on former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior adviser to work on government engagement. The company already runs offices elsewhere in Asia, including Japan, Singapore and South Korea.
India is a hard market to monetise, and OpenAI faces heavy competition. Google pushes Gemini plans in India, while Perplexity has teamed up with Bharti Airtel to give more than 360 million customers a year of Perplexity Pro at no cost, an assertive offer in a price-sensitive market.
If you’re OpenAI, you don’t ignore that kind of bundling; you match it with local pricing and on-the-ground presence.
Regulatory clouds are forming as well. News agency ANI and the Digital News Publishers Association have sued OpenAI in the Delhi High Court over alleged unauthorised use of copyrighted material to train its systems.
OpenAI denies wrongdoing. How those cases land could impact what’s permissible for training data in India. We’ll be watching that.
India’s government, meanwhile, is publicly welcoming the move. IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said: “OpenAI’s decision to establish a presence in India reflects the country’s growing leadership in digital innovation and AI adoption … we welcome OpenAI’s partnership in advancing this vision to ensure the benefits of AI reach every citizen.” The political signal is to build here, and help scale a national ecosystem.
Bottom line: a cut-price plan, local hiring, and a New Delhi, India office, address show OpenAI is betting big on India’s users and talent. The prize is huge. So are the risks — legal, competitive, and commercial.
