OpenAI taps Tata for 100MW AI data center capacity in India, eyes 1GW

OpenAI has entered into a partnership with India’s Tata Group to secure 100 megawatts of AI-ready data centre capacity in the country, with the ambition to scale that footprint to 1 gigawatt over time. The move is part of OpenAI’s broader effort to deepen its presence in enterprise and infrastructure in one of its fastest-growing markets.

OpenAI said on Thursday that the deal with the Tata Group is being carried out under its Stargate project, an initiative focused on building AI-ready infrastructure and expanding enterprise adoption worldwide. As part of the agreement, OpenAI will become the first customer of Tata Consultancy Services’ HyperVault data centre business, with an initial capacity of 100 megawatts. The partnership also includes rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise across Tata’s workforce and standardising AI-native software development through OpenAI’s tools.

The partnership falls under the company’s “OpenAI for India” initiative and reflects OpenAI’s expanding footprint in the country. CEO Sam Altman has said recent estimates show India has more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users, including students, teachers, developers, and entrepreneurs. That level of usage has made India one of OpenAI’s most important growth markets as it increases enterprise and infrastructure investments there.

By securing local data centre capacity, OpenAI will be able to run its most advanced models within India, cutting latency for users while also meeting data residency, security, and compliance requirements for regulated industries and government-related workloads. Domestic hosting is considered crucial for enterprises that handle sensitive information and operate under data localisation and digital infrastructure rules. It could expand OpenAI’s access to customers who require in-country processing.

The initial 100-megawatt commitment is significant in the context of AI infrastructure, where training and running large-scale models require power-intensive clusters of graphics processing units, or GPUs. If OpenAI and Tata scale up deployment to 1 gigawatt, the facility would rank among the largest AI-focused data centre deployments worldwide, hunderscoringthe scale of OpenAI’s longer-term ambitions in India.

Beyond data centre capacity, OpenAI and the data group plan to pursue a strategic enterprise collaboration to accelerate AI adoption across Tata’s businesses. The conglomerate expects to roll out ChatGPT Enterprise to its workforce over the next few years, beginning with hundreds of thousands of employees at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), making it one of the largest enterprise AI deployments globally. TCS also plans to use OpenAI’s Codex tools to standardise AI-native software development across its engineering organisation.

N. Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, said the partnership with OpenAI would help build “state-of-the-art AI infrastructure in India” while also supporting efforts to skill India’s workforce for the AI era.