With 100 million weekly users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, India has crossed a milestone. Whether it gains from it is a different question.
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” — Stephen Hawking
A hundred million Indians have already made that choice. But there is a difference between a change that benefits you and a change that simply happens near you — and that difference is what this article examines.
India’s Breakneck ChatGPT Growth
Standing in New Delhi on February 18, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 that India has crossed 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users — one in every eight users worldwide — making it the platform’s second-largest market after the United States. “As of this month, India is home to more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users, from students and teachers to developers and entrepreneurs,” said OpenAI in a company statement.
For a country long known for building technology for the world rather than owning it, this shift carries unusual weight. The question is no longer adoption, but advantage.
Scale Without Symmetry
Between early 2025 and February 2026, ChatGPT’s user base in India expanded rapidly, roughly quadrupling in size. Data from the third-party analytics firm Semrush indicates that in January 2026, the United States accounted for the largest share of ChatGPT’s web traffic at about 19.03% of global visits — around 1.05 billion out of an estimated 5.5 billion total visits. India ranked second, contributing approximately 7.97% of visits, or about 438 million. Based on these estimates, the U.S. share of ChatGPT’s web traffic was more than double India’s during that period.
India appears to be among the largest student user bases on the platform. These are not passive users — they are students, developers, doctors, and professionals using AI for research, coding, writing, and complex problem-solving at a pace that has outrun every market except America.
Pricing India, Localizing Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI’s pricing decisions show how seriously it takes India. On August 19, 2025, it launched ChatGPT Go exclusively in India at ₹399 ($4.60) per month — the most affordable ChatGPT plan worldwide, nearly half of the $8 fee that was later charged to users in the United States. The platform also integrated native UPI payments — a signal of deliberate localization, not surface-level market entry.
In October 2025, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Go would be free for 12 months for all eligible Indian users. The promotion went live on November 4, the same day as OpenAI’s DevDay Exchange in Bengaluru — a developer event series that also visited São Paulo, London, Tokyo, and Seoul that year.
OpenAI launched IndQA — a benchmark designed to evaluate Artificial Intelligence (AI) model performance across 12 Indian languages — and has expanded support for regional language inputs across its products.
The company has said it plans to open new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru later this year, alongside its existing presence in New Delhi, placing technical and commercial teams on the ground rather than managing the market remotely from San Francisco.
Adoption Without Ownership
The surge in usage reflects India’s massive online population, young demographics and rising interest in artificial intelligence tools across education, work and daily life.
That tension — between India as a massive consumer of AI and India as a builder of it — is the defining question beneath the market milestone. India’s 100 million users are generating enormous value for a platform headquartered in San Francisco, regulated under American law, and ultimately accountable to American investors.
Early Signals from Job Market
A survey of 651 IT firms across 10 Indian cities, conducted by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) with support from OpenAI between November 2025 and January 2026, found that AI has been linked to a slowdown in hiring — not a fall in total employment. At the entry level, 55% of firms report a decline in hiring, while 35% report an increase. For mid-level roles, 42% report an increase and 25% a decline. Senior-level employment is largely stable, with 82% of firms reporting no change. Looking ahead two years, 44% of firms expect no major change in overall workforce size, 28% expect growth, and 27% expect a decline.
India’s Bid to Build its Own AI Future
India isn’t just riding the global AI wave — it’s trying to build one of its own. Through the IndiaAI Mission, the government has committed ₹10,372 crore to build domestic AI infrastructure and foster the development of indigenous models. At the same time, startups like Sarvam AI and Krutrim are creating large language models tailored for Indian users, while institutions like NASSCOM and IIT Madras are working on AI tools in local languages, targeting everyday sectors like farming and healthcare.
Partnerships, Campuses and Capability Building
As Silicon Republic noted, citing The New York Times, “India brims with tech talent but not the companies that command it.”
The 100,000 ChatGPT education licenses across IIM Ahmedabad, AIIMS, Manipal Academy, UPES, Pearl Academy, and IIT Delhi are the most visible part of OpenAI’s India push.
OpenAI has also partnered with Pine Labs on payments infrastructure and collaborated with Physics Wallah, upGrad and HCL GUVI on AI training for early-career professionals.
Enterprise Expansion and Infrastructure Initiatives
OpenAI is set to become the first customer of TCS’s HyperVault data center business, beginning with 100 megawatts and potentially scaling to one gigawatt. Tata Group plans a large-scale rollout of ChatGPT Enterprise across hundreds of thousands of TCS employees. TCS will also become the first non-US organization to join OpenAI’s professional AI certification program.
Efficiency Gains vs Employment Pressures
TCS is being celebrated as OpenAI’s flagship enterprise partner. In July 2025, Reuters reported that TCS would reduce its workforce by about 2%, with the cuts amounting to roughly 12,200 positions. Hiring remained limited. The Times of India reported that India’s five largest IT services firms added just 17 net employees in the December quarter. This is not necessarily a contradiction — companies restructure during technological transitions — but it does raise the question of who bears the cost of that transition.
Automation and Workforce Shifts
AI is beginning to reshape hiring patterns and job roles across industries. Tasks once assigned to entry-level employees — such as routine bug fixes and basic customer support — are increasingly being automated. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimated that about 40% of employers globally expect to reduce staff in areas where AI can take over. In India’s IT sector, those early signs are already showing up.
Between Optimism and Caution
Despite the anxiety around jobs, the sector continues to play a crucial role in the economy. Data from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) shows that the industry contributed approximately 7.3% to India’s GDP in FY2024–25.
India’s policy and industry leaders are increasingly vocal about these tensions. In his virtual address at India AI Impact Summit 2026, the Chief Economic Advisor Dr V Anantha Nageswaran cautioned that artificial intelligence could either advance India’s broader ambitions or hinder them, and that the outcome would be shaped by deliberate choices rather than chance. He underscored that aligning technological adoption with large-scale employment must be treated as a national priority, adding that this responsibility cannot rest solely with the government but requires a coordinated “Team India” effort involving policymakers, industry, educators, and society.
Vineet Nayar, former CEO of HCL Technologies, brought up something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. As global AI systems get smarter, a big part of what’s feeding them is data from Indian users. His concern is straightforward: if India doesn’t build its own AI capabilities and put proper data governance in place, it could end up playing a very limited role in this story — generating the raw material while others capture the value. The benefits flowing from Indian user data, he warned, could end up enriching foreign platforms far more than India itself.
G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant expressed a more hopeful outlook, saying that artificial intelligence is likely to create new kinds of work, much like earlier technological shifts that disrupted some roles while giving rise to entirely new ones. At the same time, he acknowledged a key risk: if the rewards from large-scale AI investments are captured by only a small group of players, the technology could end up widening inequality rather than reducing it.
Structural Transition Underway
India’s AI story is neither triumph nor threat alone, but a transition reshaping both opportunity and risk.
India’s 100 million weekly users reflect remarkable engagement. Whether that engagement converts into ownership, capability, and economic leverage remains the real question.
The milestone matters — but it is only the beginning. Whether it leads somewhere depends on how urgently India invests in skilling, data governance, and building technology it can call its own.
