समाचार Samāchār · Tech & AI · 3 November 2026

India is now ChatGPT’s largest market, says OpenAI. The users are ours. The model is not

OpenAI’s India head Prabhjeet Singh says weekly users have doubled since January, lifting India from second place. He gave no total. Voice, Hindi, UPI and ads come next.

The largest ChatGPT user base in the world is now India, on OpenAI’s own count. Prabhjeet Singh, OpenAI’s India managing director, says India has become the top market by weekly active users, up from second place. He says the base has doubled since January. The Economic Times and The Times of India carried his interviews on Tuesday.

Read the claim for what it is. It comes from the company. Singh gave no total, and the reports cite no independent count. The last disclosed figure came from Sam Altman in February: about 100 million weekly users in India, out of about 800 million worldwide.

The usage is what builders should study. Singh says many Indians press dictation rather than type. OpenAI is working on Hindi and vernacular voice, on running on entry-level phones with limited memory, and on its low-cost ChatGPT Go plan. UPI and payments announcements are expected in the coming weeks. Ads are expanding too, with Razorpay’s Engage platform helping brands such as Tanishq and Tata Neu run campaigns. Singh says advertisers get no personal information and ads do not influence answers.

Now the harder reading. India supplies the users. The model and the roadmap are decided elsewhere. OpenAI has local pieces: a TCS HyperVault partnership starting at 100 MW and potentially reaching 1 GW, and local inference through Amazon Bedrock. These help. They are still rented capability. Singh backs clear AI regulation, and MeitY is weighing separate rules for AI intermediaries. The demand question is now settled. India needs sovereign foundation models and Indic AI run as public infrastructure, and it needs them while this user base is still forming its habits.

What a founder takes from it: India has shown it wants AI in its own language, by voice, on a cheap phone. Founders should build for that user now. The country should make sure a sovereign Indic model is there to serve that user too, as public infrastructure on the UPI pattern.