OpenAI is drawing up plans for a hyperscale data centre in India that could supply at least one gigawatt of computing power, according to people familiar with the project cited by Bloomberg.
They said the San Francisco start-up is meeting potential local partners and hopes to confirm a site in the coming months, with an announcement possible when founder Sam Altman visits India later this month.
The proposed facility would be one of the largest in the country, rivalling recent investments by Microsoft and Google. It forms part of OpenAI’s global Stargate programme, a multibillion-dollar campaign to build energy-hungry infrastructure for advanced artificial-intelligence models. In the United States the company has already committed to using 4.5 gigawatts of capacity through a joint venture with SoftBank and Oracle, a plan that former president Donald Trump has praised.
Locating a plant in India offers several strategic advantages. The South Asian nation is OpenAI’s second-largest market by users, and its government is courting foreign tech firms through the 1.2 billion USD IndiaAI scheme. A domestic data hub would also ease concerns over the movement of personal information across borders, an issue that has become central to India’s draft Digital Personal Data Protection regime.
Trade politics are another factor. While Washington has restricted exports of Nvidia’s high-end chips to the United Arab Emirates, it recently dropped a proposal to extend similar controls to India, removing a significant barrier to OpenAI’s expansion. Tariff tensions have risen, however, after the United States imposed a 50 per cent levy on Indian goods, complicating broader economic relations.
OpenAI has so far declined to comment on the plan. Nonetheless, Altman signalled the company’s growing commitment in a post on X last month. “We are opening our first office in India later this year and I’m looking forward to visiting next month… chatgpt users grew 4x in the past year and we are excited to invest much more in India,” he wrote. The company has already introduced a five-dollar monthly subscription tailored to local customers and is advertising for new hires in New Delhi.
Analysts say a one-gigawatt plant would cost several billion dollars to build and require long-term access to reliable renewable energy. The scale underscores how training and running ever-larger language models is reshaping the power and real-estate needs of the technology sector.
OpenAI’s choice of partners, financing model and precise location are still to be confirmed. Even so, the project signals that the race to expand AI infrastructure is now firmly centred on high-growth markets outside North America and Europe.
