India becomes ChatGPT's largest market by weekly users, OpenAI India chief says
OpenAI India's managing director says India is now ChatGPT's largest market by weekly active users, with its local base doubling since January. The company is expanding ads, Indian-language support and enterprise partnerships, and expects to announce UPI payment features soon.
OpenAI's India managing director, Prabhjeet Singh, has said India is now ChatGPT's largest market globally by weekly active users, according to Inc42, which cited an interview with the Economic Times. He said the Indian user base has doubled since January 2026.
The claim builds on February's disclosure that India had more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users. Reports do not give a new absolute figure, and being largest by users does not mean largest by revenue; usage in India is overwhelmingly on free tiers.
Singh described growing use in daily work and said OpenAI is prioritising Indian-language capabilities and Android-first products to reach beyond big cities. India is among the largest and fastest-growing markets for Codex, with developer use emerging from tier-II cities. Enterprises, global capability centres and startups, with JioHotstar and Cars24 cited, are said to be moving from pilots to production.
OpenAI is also expanding ads on ChatGPT in India to support free and lower-priced access. Singh said advertisers will not receive personal information and ads will not influence answers. Razorpay's Engage platform will help brands run campaigns, and early advertisers include Tanishq, Tata Neu and Shaadi.com. UPI and payments features are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
On infrastructure, the report points to a partnership with TCS's HyperVault data-centre business starting at 100 MW and potentially scaling to 1 GW, and availability of OpenAI models through Amazon Bedrock for local inference.
Why it matters
Scale of use gives India leverage over how global AI products are priced, localised and regulated, and it makes data residency and advertising practices matters of national interest.
The shift from free usage to payments and ads will test whether Indian consumers convert into paying users.
Indicops view
For Indian government and enterprise teams, widespread employee use of consumer AI is a governance fact, not a forecast. Sanctioned tools with data-residency options, clear usage policies and sector-appropriate controls are more effective than attempting bans.
More in AI News
Back to the newsroomJensen Huang steps down as Nvidia CEO; CFO Colette Kress becomes interim chief
Nvidia's founder resigned as chief executive on 12 November after a board meeting, with CFO Colette Kress taking over on an interim basis while a search begins. The shares fell as much as 13 per cent, and quarterly results are due on 17 November.
Google adds TPU 8tx and 8i Max, taking its eighth-generation TPU family to four chips
Google has expanded its eighth-generation TPU line with TPU 8tx, for confidential inference and small-scale training, and TPU 8i Max, a dual-chip package for long-context inference. It also open-sourced TorchTPU and TPU Sync. Availability dates for the new chips were not given.
Iran-linked hackers sabotage refrigeration controllers across Israel, the US and Europe
NPR reports that a group calling itself Cyber Isnaad Front, which Israeli incident responders attribute to Iranian military hackers, has sabotaged industrial refrigeration systems from a food plant in Israel to roughly 300 French supermarkets and, in early November, retailers across six more European countries. Internet-exposed Danfoss controllers were a common entry point.