OpenAI to build India data center in Stargate push

OpenAI is exploring plans to set up a large data center in India, according to sources familiar with the matter.

This would mark a major step in Asia for its Stargate-branded AI infrastructure initiative.

The San Francisco-based company, known for ChatGPT, is seeking local partners for a facility with at least 1-gigawatt capacity, though the location and timeline have not been finalized.

If built, the site would be among the largest in India, where companies such as Microsoft and Google have also invested in data infrastructure.

OpenAI is also opening an office in New Delhi and increasing hiring in the country, which is its second-largest market by users.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ OpenAI’s planned facility dwarfs existing Indian data center infrastructure

The proposed 1-gigawatt data center would represent a massive leap in scale for India’s data center market.

Currently, the largest AI-ready data center campus in North India operates at just 130 megawatts of IT capacity2. OpenAI’s planned facility would be nearly eight times larger than this existing benchmark.

To put this in perspective, India’s entire data center market is projected to reach 4,500 megawatts by 2030 with $25 billion in anticipated investments3. OpenAI’s single facility would represent roughly 22% of the country’s total projected capacity.

This scale reflects the massive computational requirements of modern AI systems, which demand far more power than traditional data center applications.

Even established players like CtrlS, which announced a ₹2,000 crore investment for India’s largest Tier-4 data center footprint, operate at significantly smaller scales than what OpenAI is proposing4.

2️⃣ Infrastructure investment proceeds despite escalating trade tensions

OpenAI’s data center plans advance amid ongoing U.S.-India trade tensions.

Trump recently imposed 50% tariffs on Indian goods, affecting approximately $65 billion in annual merchandise exports as a response to India’s Russian oil purchases5 6.