India Overtakes US as ChatGPT's Largest Market, OpenAI India Chief Says

Singh, a former Uber India president who became OpenAI's first India head this year, gave the figure in his first interview in the role, with The Economic Times. He did not give an absolute number. OpenAI said in February that India had more than 100 million weekly users, when chief executive Sam Altman described it as the company's second-largest market. Weekly active users, which count anyone who opens ChatGPT at least once a week on free or paid plans, is the only usage measure OpenAI discloses.

The milestone matters because India's users are mostly on free or low-cost plans, which makes the country the main test of whether OpenAI can turn very large usage into revenue through advertising rather than subscriptions. OpenAI has not disclosed revenue or subscriber numbers for India.

Ads and Indian Brands

OpenAI began showing ads in India at the end of August to logged-in adults on ChatGPT's Free tier and its Go plan, which costs ₹399 a month there. Paid Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education accounts remain ad-free. The company named WPP and Omnicom as its first Indian agency partners and said at launch that more than 50 brands were expected to go live, with a self-serve ads manager offering daily budgets from ₹725.

In October OpenAI added payments company Razorpay as a partner to help Indian brands prepare product catalogues and run and measure ChatGPT campaigns. Early advertisers include Tanishq, Fastrack, Traya, Tata Neu, Rivaah by Tanishq, Shaadi.com, Axis Max Life, Palmonas and NMIMS. Singh said ads would help pay for free and cheaper access, that advertisers would not receive users' personal information, and that ads would not influence ChatGPT's answers. OpenAI says ads are not shown to users under 18 or alongside health, mental health or political topics.

OpenAI first tested ads in the US in February, where the pilot passed $100 million in annualised revenue within six weeks, according to the company, before extending them to markets including the UK, Japan, Brazil and 31 European countries.

What Drove the Growth

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Go in India in August 2025 at under $5 a month and later made it free for a year for Indian users who signed up from November 4, 2025. Altman has said people aged 18 to 24 make up nearly half of Indian usage. Singh said the next wave of users will come from outside English-speaking circles, and that OpenAI is prioritising Hindi and other Indian languages, voice support, entry-level Android phones with limited memory, and Android-first development.

Competition for paying users is sharper than download figures suggest. Sensor Tower data cited in the coverage shows ChatGPT was India's most downloaded app, but Anthropic's Claude, fifth by downloads, ranked second by revenue among generative AI apps, with Indian revenue up more than 19-fold year on year in the June quarter. Together the two apps took nearly 83% of India's AI app revenue.

On infrastructure, OpenAI is the first customer of HyperVault, Tata Consultancy Services' data centre business, under a partnership that starts at 100 megawatts and could reach 1 gigawatt as part of its Stargate programme. Local capacity helps meet data residency demands from Indian banks, insurers and government departments.

Singh said OpenAI expects to make announcements on UPI and payments in the coming weeks, building on an agentic payments pilot with the National Payments Corporation of India and Razorpay that lets users buy and pay inside a ChatGPT conversation.