OpenAI chief Sam Altman plans to visit India as AI leaders meet in New Delhi: sources

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is planning 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 artificial intelligence summit that is expected to attract top executives from Meta, Google and Anthropic.

India is hosting its first major AI event — the India AI Impact Summit 2026 — in New Delhi from February 16-20, bringing together global technology leaders, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei along with key Indian business figures such as Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, according to the summit’s website. Altman is not currently listed as a confirmed attendee.

But TechCrunch has learned that OpenAI is separately planning to host closed-door meetings on the sidelines of the summit in New Delhi, where Altman is expected to attend. The company is also hosting an OpenAI event in New Delhi on February 19, with venture capitalists and industry executives invited, a person familiar with the matter said.

Altman’s visit has not been publicly announced, and plans could still change, sources said.

Several other US companies are also planning to hold side events during Summit Week. Anthropic is hosting a developer day in Bengaluru on February 16, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Nvidia is also scheduled to hold an evening event in New Delhi during the week of the summit, people familiar with the plans told TechCrunch. (The GPU manufacturer did not respond to requests for comment.) The lineup of events underscores how global AI companies are seeking to engage Indian enterprise customers, the startup ecosystem, and the developer community.

The trip will mark Altman’s first visit to India in nearly a year, after he traveled to the country in February 2025. Altman had previously said he planned to return later in 2025 after OpenAI’s August announcement of an office in New Delhi, but that trip did not happen.

Altman’s visit also comes at a time when India has emerged as a key growth market for US AI companies. In recent months, Anthropic announced an office in Bengaluru and appointed former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose as its local head, while Google and Perplexity have struck partnerships with Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, respectively, to bundle premium AI subscriptions for millions of telecom users.

OpenAI has expanded its presence in India in recent months, hiring across enterprise sales, technical publishing, and legal roles focused on AI regulation. The company is currently listing openings in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. India has emerged as the largest market for ChatGPT in terms of downloads and the second largest market in terms of users. However, OpenAI has faced challenges converting this demand into paid subscriptions, introducing a lower-priced “ChatGPT Go” plan last year at less than $5 and offering it free for a year to increase uptake.

Altman is expected to meet key technology executives, startup founders and government officials during the trip, the sources said, as OpenAI looks to expand enterprise adoption of ChatGPT while continuing to expand its reach as a mass-market product. The company deals with multiple sectors in India, including education and media, the people added.

OpenAI is also looking at India as a potential base for infrastructure expansion, sources said. Last year, both Google and Microsoft announced multi-billion dollar investments in India to expand their AI and cloud footprints. But India’s data center ambitions face constraints, including uneven power availability, high energy costs, and water scarcity in many regions — factors that could slow the buildout of AI infrastructure and raise operating costs for cloud providers.

However, the Indian government hopes that the upcoming summit will strengthen India’s position as a destination for large-scale investment in artificial intelligence. The country’s IT minister said in a recent interview that the event could help attract up to $100 billion in investments. The federal government is also pushing domestic startups to build smaller models for domestic use cases, ultimately reducing reliance on existing systems in the United States.

OpenAI, the Indian Ministry of Information Technology and the organizers of the AI ​​Summit did not respond to requests for comment.