At the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi on February 18, OpenAI showed up with something bigger than a product update, as India already sees more ChatGPT weekly users than any country outside the United States — 100 million of them.
The company launched OpenAI for India — a nationwide initiative anchored by a multi-dimensional strategic partnership with the Tata Group, a payments collaboration with Pine Labs—and confirmed plans to open new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru later this year, joining its existing base in New Delhi.
"Through OpenAI for India, we're working together to build the infrastructure, skills, and local partnerships needed to build AI with India, for India, and in India,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at the Summit.
Damilare Odedina
Tata Group Is Building the Data Center and OpenAI Moves in as Its First Customer
The infrastructure component is what separates this from a standard enterprise partnership. OpenAI will become the first customer of Tata Consultancy Services' HyperVault data center business, starting with 100 megawatts of capacity and a documented option to scale to 1 gigawatt over time. The facility is built specifically for data residency, security, and compliance — the requirements that government and mission-critical enterprise workloads demand before sensitive data can move onto any platform. It sits directly inside OpenAI's global Stargate initiative.
On the enterprise side, Tata Group will deploy ChatGPT Enterprise across its workforce over the next several years, starting with hundreds of thousands of TCS employees, which OpenAI describes as one of the largest enterprise AI deployments in the world. TCS will also standardize software development across its teams using OpenAI's Codex tools.
Tata Sons Chairman N. Chandrasekaran said at the Summit: "This is a unique opportunity for OpenAI and TCS to transform industries. Together we will skill India's youth and empower them to succeed in the AI era."
Pine Labs Becomes OpenAI's First Payments Partner in India
Alongside the Tata deal, Pine Labs — which operates across 980,000 merchant touchpoints and 177 financial institutions — is confirmed as OpenAI's first payment partner for ChatGPT in India. The collaboration is built around what both companies describe as agentic commerce: AI that can discover, recommend, and complete transactions on a user's behalf inside the payment flow itself.
The full partner list tied to OpenAI for India also includes JioHotstar, Eternal, HCLTech, PhonePe, CRED, Cars24, and MakeMyTrip.
On education, OpenAI is running two separate tracks. The first is workforce-facing: TCS joins OpenAI Certifications as the first participating organization outside the United States, designed to build practical AI skills across professional roles. The second is student-facing: over 100,000 ChatGPT Edu licenses going to IIM Ahmedabad, AIIMS New Delhi, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, and Pearl Academy.
Damilare Odedina
