New Delhi: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has dropped a massive statistic just hours before the India AI Impact Summit kicks off in New Delhi. He revealed that
India now accounts for 100 million weekly active users of ChatGPT. This makes the country one of the largest markets for the company globally. The disclosure came in a column published in The Times of India. as the tech world descends on the capital for the five day event.
Altman is in town to attend the summit starting today along with other global tech leaders. He noted that India is now the second largest user base for ChatGPT right after the United States. This is a huge jump and shows how fast people here are adopting new tools. Globally the platform has reached around 800 million weekly active users by October 2025.
Students are the biggest power users
It seems the youth are really driving this growth. Altman pointed out that India has the largest number of student users of ChatGPT in the world. This is not surprising given the young population and over a billion internet users here. OpenAI even opened an office in New Delhi back in August 2025 to focus on this market. They launched a cheaper subscription called ChatGPT Go which cost less than 5 dollars. It was later made free for a year to get more people on board.
Competitors are not sitting quiet either. Google has been aggressively targeting Indian students too. They offered a free one year subscription to their AI Pro plan in September 2025. Even Google’s Chris Phillips mentioned that India accounts for the highest global usage of Google’s Gemini for learning. The battle for the Indian user is clearly heating up.
What Altman said about future risks
Despite these huge numbers there are still some worries. Altman wrote about the challenge of turning this usage into real economic money. He warned that uneven access could be a problem. He wrote “Given India’s size, it also risks forfeiting a vital opportunity to advance democratic AI in emerging markets around the world.”
The summit starting today will see discussions on these very topics. Leaders like Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are expected to be there. Even political figures like French President Emmanuel Macron are attending. Altman signaled that OpenAI plans to deepen its engagement with the Indian government soon. We can expect some new partnerships to be announced in the coming days.
