OpenAI CEO Sam Altman plans to visit India in mid-February, his first visit to the country in nearly a year, TechCrunch has learned. The visit comes as New Delhi prepares to host a major AI summit that is expected to attract top executives from Meta, Google and Anthropic.
India hosts its first major AI event: the India AI Impact Summit 2026 — in New Delhi between February 16 and 20, bringing together global technology leaders including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, alongside key figures from the Indian business world like Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, according to the summit. website. Altman is currently not listed as a confirmed attendee.
But TechCrunch has learned that OpenAI separately plans to hold closed-door meetings on the sidelines of the New Delhi summit, where Altman is expected to be present. The company is also holding an OpenAI event in New Delhi on February 19, to which venture capitalists and industry executives are invited, a person familiar with the matter said.
Altman’s visit has not been announced publicly and plans could still change, the sources said.
Several other U.S. companies are also planning side events around the week of the summit. Anthropic is hosting a developer day in Bangalore on February 16, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Nvidia is also expected to host a party in New Delhi during the week of the summit, people familiar with the plans told TechCrunch. (The GPU maker did not respond to requests for comment.) This series of events highlights how global AI companies are seeking to engage enterprise customers, the startup ecosystem and the Indian developer community.
The trip would mark Altman’s first visit to India in nearly a year, after traveled the country in February 2025. Altman previously said he planned to come back later in 2025 following OpenAI’s August announcement of an office in New Delhi, but that trip did not happen.
Altman’s visit also comes as India has emerged as a key growth market for US AI companies. In recent months, Anthropic announced the establishment of an office in Bangalore and appointed former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose as its local head, while Google and Perplexity entered into partnerships with Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, respectively, to bundle premium AI subscriptions for millions of telecom users.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
OpenAI has expanded its presence in India in recent months, hiring in enterprise sales, technical deployment, and legal roles focused on AI regulation. The company currently lists openings in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. India has become ChatGPT’s largest market in terms of downloads And second largest number of users. Yet OpenAI has struggled to convert that demand into paid subscriptions, introducing a cheaper “ChatGPT Go” plan last year at less than $5 and offering it free for a year to boost adoption.
Altman is expected to meet with key technology executives, startup founders and government officials during the trip, the sources said, as OpenAI seeks to expand enterprise adoption of ChatGPT while broadening its reach as a mass product. The company is engaged in several sectors in India, including education and media, the sources added.
OpenAI also sees India as a potential base for infrastructure expansion, the sources said. Last year, Google and Microsoft announced multibillion-dollar investments in India to expand their AI and cloud footprint. But India’s data center ambitions face constraints including uneven power availability, high energy costs, and water shortages in several regions – factors that could slow the development of AI infrastructure and increase operating costs for cloud providers.
The Indian government nevertheless hopes that the upcoming summit will cement India’s status as a destination for large-scale investments in AI. The country’s IT minister said in a recent interview that the event could help attract up to 100 billion dollars in investment. The federal government is also pushing domestic startups to build smaller models for local use cases, reducing reliance on US-based systems.
OpenAI, India’s IT ministry and the organizers of the AI summit did not respond to requests for comment.
