OpenAI In Talks To Set Up A Data Centre In India: Report

Amid booming AI adoption in the country, ChatGPT developer OpenAI is reportedly in initial discussions to set up data centre operations in India.

The data centre will comprise data of Indian users as well as from smaller neighbouring countries, Business Standard reported, citing sources close to the matter.

Currently, the US-based company is in discussions with some data centre operators, the report said. However, the location or capacity of the proposed data centre are not clear yet. 

The development comes at a time when Chinese AI company DeepSeek has heightened competition with the launch of its latest reasoning models. 

In India, AI unicorn Krutrim has deployed DeepSeek’s latest foundation model R1 671B on Nvidia’s H100 graphics processing units. Earlier, IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the country would host DeepSeek on Indian servers to address privacy concerns.

The adoption of AI is on the rise in India and the country is among the biggest markets for major AI companies. Last week, OpenAI founder and chief executive officer Sam Altman, along with other executives, visited India. 

During his meeting with Vaishnaw, Altman said that India is an “incredibly important” market for the AI giant. On the other hand, several executives, including OpenAI’s global vice-president of engineering Srinivas Narayanan, met industry leaders to discuss the company’s future plans for India.

OpenAI is also caught in a legal tussle with Indian publishers. In a recent court filing, the company informed the Delhi High Court (HC) that it does not use the content of Indian media groups to train its AI chatbot ChatGPT.  

As a result of the increase in usage of AI, a number of global giants are investing in India to set up data centres. For instance, Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced an investment of INR 60,000 Cr (around $7 Bn) to build data centres in Telangana.

Last year, tech giant Microsoft Corporation bought 48 acres of land in Hyderabad in a transaction valued at INR 267 Cr to expand its data centre footprint in the country.