AI giants Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity are rushing into India. It could be the 'next billion users' era again. (www.businessinsider.com)

Anthropic, OpenAI and Perplexity are racing to deepen footprints in India — signing deals, opening offices and offering country-specific freebies to capture users, engineers and enterprise customers. Anthropic will open its first India office in Bengaluru next year; OpenAI plans an India office by year-end and will offer an India-specific ChatGPT plan free for a year starting in November; Perplexity is giving Airtel’s 360 million customers a free year of Pro. Big infrastructure moves are under way too: Alphabet announced a $15 billion data‑center campus, OpenAI is scouting partners for its global Stargate expansion, and India has launched a $1.2 billion IndiaAI Mission to build a 10,000‑GPU state-backed compute network and fund models for 22 official languages. Local models such as Sarvam‑1 (10 languages) and Project Indus (40 Hindi dialects) are already emerging. For AI/ML practitioners the shift matters because India is being treated not as “the next billion” but as “the first billion” users — a market large enough to shape product design, training data, deployment scale and governance. That creates opportunities for large-scale multilingual models, local data‑centerization, enterprise AI adoption and a deep talent pool. It also raises risks: fears of data and value extraction, weak local R&D investment, and bias harms (recent reporting flagged caste bias in advanced models). The outcome — whether India becomes an AI development hub or primarily a resource market for Western models — will influence global model training datasets, infrastructure geographies and AI policy standards.