OpenAI in talks with Ambani's Reliance, others to bring $500 billion Stargate project to India: Report

ChatGPT maker OpenAI is reportedly in preliminary talks with Indian data center operators and Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries to bring its $500 billion global supercomputing initiative, known as the Stargate project, to India, ET reported.

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The report said that the AI giant has approached Sify Technologies, Yotta Data Services, E2E Networks and CtrlS Datacenters to evaluate their installed capacities, power availability and location spread. In parallel, OpenAI has been engaged in discussions for more than six months with Reliance, which is planning to build one of the world’s largest data centers in Jamnagar, Gujarat.

The overtures follow a request from the Indian government that OpenAI invest “at least a few billions” of the project’s $500 billion corpus in India and store data generated by Indian users locally, said one official.

“India is becoming a key market for OpenAI and also has potential to become a large revenue generator,” the official added. The government has argued that local processing will reduce latency, improve user experience and align OpenAI with competitors such as Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon Web Services, which already operate or are expanding large-scale facilities in the country.

Announced in January, Stargate is a joint venture backed by SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX, with Masayoshi Son as chairman. Microsoft, Nvidia, Arm, Oracle and OpenAI are the initial technology partners. The four-year plan envisions vast new AI infrastructure in the United States and beyond, but India’s entry could provide a critical anchor for the country’s underdeveloped compute ecosystem.

India accounts for less than 1% of global AI compute capacity. Only 38,000 GPUs have been empanelled under the government’s IndiaAI Mission, far short of the scale required for model training. A single 1 gigawatt hyperscale data center, comparable to what OpenAI is considering, would demand nearly 135,000 of Nvidia’s advanced B100 Blackwell chips and an uninterrupted 1.3 gigawatt power supply, according to Morgan Stanley estimates.

That scale dwarfs India’s current combined data center capacity, which is under 1 GW for non-AI cloud workloads. Still, global players are beginning to make inroads: Google Cloud is expected to invest $6 billion in a 1 GW facility in Andhra Pradesh, while Reliance has announced plans for a similar capacity at Jamnagar alongside its $10 billion renewable energy complex.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has called India the company’s second-largest market after the United States and “incredibly fast growing.”

The company is setting up an office in New Delhi, hiring for sales leadership, and has launched lower-priced subscription offerings tailored to India. In May, it also enabled local data residency, allowing user prompts and files to be stored within the country, though model processing still occurs abroad.