Glenn Kaonang · · 6 min readRed carpet or red tape for AI giants?
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India has been a go-to destination for tech giants expanding into Asia, but 2025 has quickened the pace.
In just the past month, Google announced a US$15 billion investment – its largest in India to date – to build an AI hub in Visakhapatnam, complete with gigawatt-scale compute capacity. Anthropic, meanwhile, announced its plan to open an office in Bengaluru in early 2026, which follows OpenAI’s similar commitment in New Delhi.
Image credit: Arsal Ysfin
There’s a reason for this gold rush: India has the highest AI adoption rate in the world, with more than 90% of Indian workers already using AI, according to a survey by Boston Consulting Group. Both Anthropic and OpenAI count India as their second-biggest market after the US.
Beyond market size, India offers a massive English-speaking talent pool and a government actively investing in AI infrastructure through an initiative called IndiaAI Mission.
While this looks like a well-paved path for AI expansion, the trail is steeper than it seems. Tensions between the US and India have tossed the question of who gets to control India’s AI future.
In August, the US imposed a 50% tariff on Indian imports, which prompted India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to urge the use of local products. The Indian government has also quietly started promoting local alternatives to the services of Google and Microsoft.
And now, as OpenAI and Anthropic rush to open offices in India, some wonder if the country should impose conditions on these AI giants before they become too embedded to regulate.
In this week’s featured story, my colleague Samreen dives into the debate dividing India’s tech ecosystem between those who see foreign AI firms as accelerators of innovation and those who advocate for sovereignty.
Also in this issue: another household humanoid robot thinks it’s ready for the masses, AI tool Cursor’s continued smart play, and a hot take on how AI could spell doom for Salesforce.
Glenn Kaonang, journalist
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