OpenAI chief Sam Altman plans India visit as AI leaders converge 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 AI summit expected to draw top executives from Meta, Google, and Anthropic.

India is hosting 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 Indian business figures like Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, per 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 be present. The company is also hosting an OpenAI event in New Delhi on February 19, with venture capitalists and industry executives invited, one person familiar with the matter said.

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

Several other U.S. companies are also planning side events around the summit week. Anthropic is hosting a developers’ day in Bengaluru on February 16, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Nvidia is also set to hold an evening event in New Delhi during the summit week, people familiar with the plans told TechCrunch. (The GPU-maker did not respond to requests for comment.) The cluster of events underscores how global AI firms are seeking to engage India’s enterprise customers, startup ecosystem, and developer community.

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

Altman’s visit also comes as India has emerged as a key growth market for American AI companies. In recent months, Anthropic announced an office in Bengaluru and named 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 been expanding its India presence in recent months, hiring across enterprise sales, technical deployment and legal roles focused on AI regulation. The company is currently listing openings in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. India has emerged as ChatGPT’s biggest market by downloads and second-largest by users. Still, OpenAI has faced challenges converting that demand into paid subscriptions, introducing a lower-priced “ChatGPT Go” plan last year priced under $5 and offering it free for a year to drive uptake.

Altman is expected to meet key tech executives, startup founders, and government officials during the trip, the sources said, as OpenAI looks to expand ChatGPT’s enterprise adoption while still broadening its reach as a mass-market product. The company has been engaging 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, the sources said. Last year, both Google and Microsoft announced multi-billion-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 scarcity in several regions — factors that could slow the build-out of AI infrastructure and raise operating costs for cloud providers.

Still, the Indian government is hopeful that the upcoming summit will cement India’s status as a destination for large-scale AI investment. The country’s IT minister said in a recent interview that the event could help attract as much as $100 billion in investment. The federal government is also pushing domestic startups to build smaller models for local use cases, eventually reducing reliance on U.S.-based systems.

OpenAI, India’s IT ministry, and the AI summit’s organizers did not respond to requests for comment.