DeepSeek Becomes the World's Leading App, Driven by India's Surge

DeepSeek’s AI assistant has rapidly become the most downloaded mobile app worldwide, with India leading the surge in new users.

According to sources, India alone has accounted for 15.6% of the total downloads since its launch earlier in January. DeepSeek is also the top app on Google’s Play Store in the US, having held the lead since January 28. 

In just 18 days, it reached 16 million downloads—almost twice the 9 million downloads OpenAI’s ChatGPT had at launch.

The app’s rapid growth has impressed many but also raised concerns. Its low-cost model challenges leading AI companies, shaking stock markets and raising questions about the need for huge infrastructure investments in AI dominance.

Krutrim, Ola’s AI platform, is integrating DeepSeek models into its cloud infrastructure, as announced by founder Bhavish Aggarwal. “India can’t be left behind in AI. Krutrim has accelerated efforts to develop world-class AI. As a first step, our cloud now has DeepSeek models live, hosted on Indian servers. Pricing lowest in the world (sic),” he posted on X. 

Indian IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw recently announced that India will host DeepSeek on its local servers, boosting the demand for compute capability in the country. He also stated that India is set to offer the world’s most affordable compute power, providing high-end AI chips for under $1 per hour.

“DeepSeek was trained on 2000 GPUs,” Vaishnaw said. “We now have 15,000 high-end GPUs. ChatGPT was trained on about 25,000 GPUs. So this gives us a huge compute facility, something which will really give a boost to our ecosystem.” 

Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly investigating whether Chinese AI startup DeepSeek improperly accessed and utilised data from OpenAI’s models to develop its own AI system. This investigation centres on the technique known as “distillation”, where a smaller model is trained using the outputs of a larger, more advanced model.