Leading AI players make a beeline to establish their presence in India

India's billion-plus user base - second only to China - as well as one of the world's largest developer ecosystems makes it an irresistible bet for AI firms

India clearly seems to be on the radar of almost all the major global artificial intelligence (AI) firms. After OpenAI in August announced plans to set up an office in the country, Anthropic on Wednesday said that they are expanding their global footprint to cover India. Meanwhile, Perplexity - founded by an Indian-origin entrepreneur - is already working with telecom major Bharti Airtel.

 

The key reason that India is emerging as one of the most sought after markets for all these AI tech giants is its more than a billion internet user base — the only other comparable market is China — and the fact that it is home to one of the world's biggest developer ecosystems. Moreover, Indian businesses, especially the digital-native firms, have been the fastest adopters and experimenters of AI tools.

 

Abhishek Singh, additional secretary and chief executive officer of the IndiaAI Mission, said the rush of global AI firms to India underscores the country’s scale but also highlights the need for the country to build its own models.

 

“India is seen as a country with a large number of AI users. What happens is when you end up being only a user, you end up contributing your datasets and your knowledge to these models and help them get better,” he said at a fireside chat at the Global Fintech Fest 2025 in Mumbai.

 

He added that until India is able to build its own AI models and its own solutions, it has no choice but to depend on what is available.

 

Singh also highlighted that the government is supporting startups and AI firms build such models. “When we do have these models, they will be open sourced and will be available to the developer community within India. It’s very essential that we build our strength in this field and not end up being AI users for the big techs coming to India,” Singh added.

 

On Tuesday, Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO, Dario Amodei, who is also visiting India this week, said in a statement that India is compelling because of the scale of its technical talent and the commitment from the Indian government to ensure the benefits of artificial intelligence reach all areas of society, and not just concentrated pockets.

 

India is the second largest user base for Claude, Anthropic AI's model. Compared to usage in other countries, a disproportionately high amount of Claude usage in India is for technical tasks and software development, such as mobile UI development and web app debugging, according to Anthropic’s recently released Economic Index.

 

This high usage is also why other players are also flocking to India. For example, India is ChatGPT's second-largest market after the US as well as one of its fastest growing ones.

 

India also ranks among the top five developer markets globally on the OpenAI platform. Additionally, India has the largest population of students worldwide that are using ChatGPT.

 

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has in the past said that India is its largest market. While the company is still setting up an office in India, it has already started working with India’s major telecom major Bharti Airtel, with its services bundled with some Airtel plans.

 

Jaspreet Bindra, co-founder of AI&Beyond, said that global AI companies are setting up in India not just for data, but for talent, scale, and a thriving developer ecosystem. “India has one of the world’s largest pools of AI engineers and developers, many of whom have hands-on experience in machine learning, NLP, and generative AI applications,” he pointed out.

 

Bindra also added that India’s growing digital infrastructure, government openness to AI adoption, and massive language diversity makes it an ideal testing ground for scalable, multilingual AI models. “What’s happening is a natural evolution — global AI firms see India not as a back-office or outsourcing hub anymore, but as a strategic innovation partner and future market for AI products and services,” he added.