Last week, a whole host of global tech giants—from OpenAI and Anthropic to Microsoft and Google—unveiled a barrage of India-centric announcements at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, signalling a decisive shift in how Big AI views the country: not merely as its fastest growing user base, but as a strategic hub for AI infrastructure, talent, research, and deployment at scale.
OpenAI’s launch of OpenAI for India put hard infrastructure—and geopolitics—at the centre of its India thesis. The company will be the first customer of TCS HyperVault, starting with 100 MW of AI-ready capacity and a path to 1 GW, designed for data residency and mission-critical workloads. This local build-out sits inside Stargate, OpenAI’s multi-year global compute programme—placing India as a node in a distributed, US-aligned AI backbone rather than a downstream API market. With 100 million weekly ChatGPT users in India already, the infrastructure move is both demand-led and regulatory-savvy.
Anthropic took the complementary path: Opening a Bengaluru office (its second in Asia) and leaning into India’s unusually technical usage profile—nearly half of Claude activity here is coding, maths, and systems work. That’s why India is now the company’s second largest market, and why Anthropic says its revenue run rate has doubled since it announced its India push in October 2025.
CEO Dario Amodei framed India’s role as “absolutely central,” citing the country’s scale as a rare place to run population-level experiments with agentic AI while deepening language work across 10 Indic languages with partners like Karya and Digital Green.
Microsoft, on the other hand, used the Delhi spotlight to tackle the structural issue: the emerging AI divide. It said it is on pace to invest $50 billion by 2030 to bring AI infrastructure, multilingual capabilities, and skills to the Global South—explicitly positioning India as a launchpad and priority geography. The five-pillar programme spans infrastructure, schools/non-profits skilling, multilingual AI, local innovation, and measurement—a pragmatic complement to India’s sovereign compute and mass-skilling agenda.
Google’s announcements show how a hyperscaler thinks “end-to-end” about India. It announced the India–America Connect subsea cable initiative to add new high-capacity routes between India, the US, and the Southern Hemisphere—explicitly framed as AI connectivity infrastructure.
In parallel, Google DeepMind unveiled national partnerships with Indian bodies to provide access to frontier AI for Science models and power innovation hubs with GenAI assistants, while Google.org launched 30 million dollar impact challenges for government and science.
Second, enterprise transformation at scale is accelerating: OpenAI’s plan to roll out ChatGPT Enterprise across the Tata ecosystem and Anthropic’s partnerships with Infosys, Air India, and leading start-ups indicate India is a production environment, not a pilot market.
Third, language and public sector considerations matter: Anthropic’s 10-language push and DeepMind’s science and government collaborations show India’s multilingual and civic complexity is now a product-shaping force for frontier labs, not a localisation afterthought.
If the 2010s were about India as the IT back office and the 2020s began with India emerging as a breakout AI user base, the announcements last week suggest India is now being positioned as an AI power in its own right—a place where global firms want to build compute, run frontier models, test multilingual systems, and deploy agentic AI at scale.
But that aspiration comes with a hard reality check: India will only fully realise this role if it can balance resource-intensive AI infrastructure demands with its own sovereignty, affordability, energy constraints, and public interest priorities.
First Published: Feb 24, 2026, 12:13
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