India Surpasses US as Largest ChatGPT User Base, Report Finds

India has overtaken the United States to become the world’s largest user base for ChatGPT, accounting for 13.5% of global monthly active users, according to the latest AI Trends Report by Mary Meeker. 

India leads in ChatGPT mobile usage, followed by the United States at 8.9%. Other top countries include Indonesia, Brazil, Egypt, Mexico, Pakistan, Germany, France, and Vietnam. Such widespread adoption indicates that there's a global surge in interest for AI tools like ChatGPT, spanning not just major tech hubs but also emerging markets.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also hailed India’s rapid AI adoption, calling it “faster than anywhere else”. Especially when the Studio Ghibli trend was ongoing, after GPT-4o enabled native image generation in ChatGPT, there was a surge in these images from India. 

“What's happening with AI adoption in India is amazing to watch. We love to see the explosion of creativity—India is outpacing the world,” Altman posted on X at the peak of the trend.

Why is India an Important Market?

OpenAI is reportedly looking to set up a data centre in India. The company also announced that organisations using its APIs, ChatGPT Enterprise, and ChatGPT Edu will be able to store customer content within India. 

This data residency option extends to other Asian countries, including Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, allowing local data storage while using OpenAI products.

According to a Bloomberg report, OpenAI is targeting the Asia-Pacific region to build new data centres. Company officials are likely to tour the region to explore opportunities around AI infrastructure and software usage. 

In a recent congressional testimony, Altman said that he wants the entire world to be on the US stack and use US Chips and services like ChatGPT, hoping that it would push for the adoption of US applications. Altman believes the AI stack should be built as a unified system rather than separated across countries or vendors. This is under the new OpenAI for Countries initiative. 

Interesting to note, in a previous interaction with AIM, IndiaAI Mission CEO Abhishek Singh said that while models from Meta and OpenAI are being embraced, India is also strategically investing in building its own foundational models trained on Indian datasets. This addresses the limitations of existing models, which may lack a nuanced understanding of the Indian context.