OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to Visit India Amidst Major AI Summit in New Delhi
OpenAI’s Chief Executive Officer, Sam Altman, is slated to visit India in mid-February 2026, marking his first trip to the country in nearly a year. This visit coincides with New Delhi’s preparations for the inaugural India AI Impact Summit 2026, scheduled from February 16 to 20. The summit is set to attract prominent figures from the global technology sector, including Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, and Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei. Additionally, key Indian business leaders like Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani are expected to participate.
While Altman is not officially listed as a confirmed attendee of the summit, sources indicate that OpenAI is organizing private meetings on the sidelines of the event in New Delhi, with Altman anticipated to be present. Furthermore, OpenAI plans to host an event on February 19, inviting venture capitalists and industry executives. These plans have not been publicly announced and are subject to change.
Other U.S.-based AI companies are also planning events around the summit. Anthropic is hosting a developers’ day in Bengaluru on February 16, and Nvidia is expected to hold an evening event in New Delhi during the summit week. These activities highlight the increasing interest of global AI firms in engaging with India’s enterprise customers, startup ecosystem, and developer community.
Altman’s upcoming visit follows his previous trip to India in February 2025. Although he had intended to return later that year after OpenAI announced the opening of a New Delhi office in August, that visit did not materialize.
India has emerged as a significant growth market for American AI companies. Anthropic recently announced the opening of an office in Bengaluru and appointed former Microsoft India Managing Director Irina Ghose as its local head. Google and Perplexity have also formed partnerships with Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, respectively, to offer premium AI subscriptions to millions of telecom users.
OpenAI has been expanding its presence in India, hiring across enterprise sales, technical deployment, and legal roles focused on AI regulation. The company currently has openings in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. India has become ChatGPT’s largest market by downloads and the second-largest by users. To capitalize on this demand, OpenAI introduced a lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan last year, priced under $5, and offered it free for a year to drive uptake.
During his visit, Altman is expected to meet with key tech executives, startup founders, and government officials as OpenAI seeks to expand ChatGPT’s enterprise adoption and broaden its reach as a mass-market product. The company has been engaging with multiple sectors in India, including education and media.
OpenAI is also considering India as a potential base for infrastructure expansion. Last year, both Google and Microsoft announced multibillion-dollar investments in India to expand their AI and cloud footprint. However, India’s data-center ambitions face challenges, including uneven power availability, high energy costs, and water scarcity in several regions, which could slow the build-out of AI infrastructure and raise operating costs for cloud providers.
The Indian government is optimistic that the upcoming summit will solidify India’s status as a destination for large-scale AI investment. The country’s IT minister recently stated that the event could help attract as much as $100 billion in investment. The federal government is also encouraging domestic startups to develop smaller models for local use cases, aiming to reduce reliance on U.S.-based systems.
OpenAI, India’s IT ministry, and the AI summit’s organizers did not respond to requests for comment.
