OpenAI to store ChatGPT Enterprise and API user data locally in India

Move aimed at helping companies meet local data sovereignty norms

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OpenAI on Thursday said the data of Indian ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and OpenAI API (application programming interface) platform users will now be stored locally in the country.

 

“This will help companies using these products meet local data sovereignty requirements when using OpenAI products in their businesses and building new solutions with artificial intelligence (AI).” 

 

For ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Edu users in India, this will mean that their conversations with ChatGPT and custom GPTs, including user prompts, uploaded files, and content across text, vision, and image modalities, will be stored in India.

 

Eligible customers of the ChatGPT API platform can enable data residency by creating a new project in the API platform dashboard and selecting the relevant country. Currently, data storage for the API platform will be stored in the selected region,” OpenAI said.

 

Business Standard had reported in February that OpenAI had initiated the process of setting up data centre operations in India to support the growing number of users and the burgeoning load of the extensive use cases of its AI tools in the country.

 

India has grown to be the second-largest market for OpenAI, and the number of users in the country tripled by 2024, the company’s chief executive officer (CEO) Sam Altman had said during his visit to the country in February.

 

“Seeing what people are building in India with AI at all the levels of the stack, chips, models…you know all of the incredible applications, I think India should be doing everything. It is quite amazing to see what the country has done and embraced the technology,” Altman had said during his India visit.

 

After Altman’s visit, OpenAI executives had later that week held two separate meetings, the first with government officials from the Prime Minister’s Office, the US Embassy in India, the ministry of finance, the ministry of home affairs, and the second with technology policy advocacy groups which was organised by The Quantum Hub.

 

Both these meetings also saw OpenAI executives, including Vice-President of engineering Srinivas Narayanan, explain the products and offerings and the importance of the country in the overall plans of the company, sources had then told Business Standard.

 

On Thursday, OpenAI also announced a data residency programme for ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and the API Platform users in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. The company had earlier announced similar data residency programmes in Europe.

 

“Data residency builds on OpenAI’s robust data privacy, security, and compliance features, which support hundreds of organisations partnering with OpenAI across Asia today — startups, large enterprises, academic institutions etc — including Kakao, SoftBank, Grab, Singapore Airlines, and many more,” the company said in a blog post.