OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is planning a mid-February visit to India, his first trip to the country in nearly a year, as TechCrunch reports. The move comes as New Delhi prepares to host the India AI Impact Summit 2026, a five-day event expected to draw the biggest names in AI - including Meta, Google, and Anthropic executives - alongside India's top business leaders. The convergence signals a pivotal moment for India's emergence as a battleground market for American AI companies seeking to convert the world's most populous nation into paying customers.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is heading back to India, and he's not coming alone. The ChatGPT maker is quietly planning closed-door meetings in New Delhi around mid-February, coinciding with what could be India's most significant AI gathering yet - the India AI Impact Summit 2026, running February 16-20.
According to sources familiar with the plans, Altman's visit hasn't been publicly announced and could still shift, but OpenAI is already lining up private sessions on the summit's sidelines. The company's also hosting its own event on February 19, with VCs and industry executives invited.
The timing is hardly coincidental. India's first major AI summit is pulling in the entire industry's A-list - Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are all confirmed attendees, alongside Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani. Altman's name isn't on the official roster, but his separate meetings suggest OpenAI is taking a different approach - one focused on direct engagement rather than stage appearances.
This marks Altman's first India trip in nearly a year. He last visited in February 2025, and though he'd promised to return later that year after OpenAI announced a New Delhi office in August, that trip never materialized. Now he's back with more at stake.
The summit's turning into a full-blown AI industry takeover of New Delhi. Anthropic confirmed it's hosting a developers' day in Bengaluru on February 16, while Nvidia is planning an evening event during summit week, according to people briefed on the arrangements. The cluster of side events reveals how U.S. AI companies are racing to lock in relationships with India's enterprise buyers, startup founders, and developer community.
India's become impossible to ignore. ChatGPT is the country's biggest app by downloads and second-largest by users globally. But turning that massive user base into revenue? That's where OpenAI is hitting roadblocks. The company launched ChatGPT Go last year - a sub-$5 subscription tier - then went further by offering it free for a year just to drive adoption.
Altman's expected to meet tech executives, startup founders, and government officials during the visit, sources said, as OpenAI pushes to expand ChatGPT's enterprise footprint while still chasing mass-market growth. The company's been talking to players across education and media sectors, the people added.
Meanwhile, competitors are already making moves. Anthropic opened a Bengaluru office and hired former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose to lead local operations. Google and Perplexity cut deals with Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel to bundle premium AI subscriptions for millions of telecom customers.
OpenAI is ramping up its own presence, hiring across enterprise sales, technical deployment, and AI regulation roles in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. But the company's also eyeing India for infrastructure expansion, according to sources. Last year, Google pledged $1.5 billion and Microsoft committed $17.5 billion to build out AI and cloud capacity in India.
But India's data center ambitions face serious constraints - patchy power supply, high energy costs, and water scarcity in key regions could slow infrastructure buildouts and drive up operating expenses for cloud providers.
Still, the Indian government is betting big. The country's IT minister recently said the summit could help attract as much as $100 billion in investment. New Delhi is also pushing domestic startups to build smaller, localized AI models, hoping to reduce long-term dependence on U.S.-based systems.
OpenAI, India's IT ministry, and the summit organizers didn't respond to requests for comment.
Altman's return to India - alongside the convergence of AI's biggest players in New Delhi - marks a turning point for the industry's approach to emerging markets. India offers what every AI company craves: massive scale, a growing developer ecosystem, and government backing for AI adoption. But converting free users into paying customers remains the hard part. As OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta all descend on New Delhi with checkbooks and partnership pitches, the real test is whether they can build sustainable business models in a market where price sensitivity and infrastructure constraints collide with sky-high expectations. The next few weeks could reshape how American AI companies think about India - not just as a user base, but as a strategic market worth billions in investment.
