Anthropic, Google and OpenAI Bet Big on India

The shift reflects a broader realization within the industry that the next phase of the AI race will be determined not only by breakthroughs in research but also by access to massive user bases that generate data and adopt new digital services at scale.

In February, the chief executives of Google, Anthropic and OpenAI appeared together in New Delhi alongside Prime Minister Narendra Modi at India AI Impact Summit, underscoring the country’s growing role in the global AI ecosystem.

The symbolism was difficult to miss. As Bloomberg reported, major technology companies are pouring capital into India as they compete for influence in a market increasingly seen as central to the next stage of AI development.

The financial commitments are enormous. Amazon, Google and Microsoft have collectively committed more than $67.5 billion to deepen their AI footprint in India. The Indian government expects the broader AI sector to attract more than $200 billion in investment over the next two years as global companies build infrastructure, partnerships and local ecosystems.

Individual companies are already making massive bets. Google announced a $15 billion data center investment in southeastern India last year, calling it its largest AI hub outside the United States, according to The Wall Street Journal. Microsoft followed with a $17.5 billion investment commitment, its largest ever in Asia, while Amazon has pledged $35 billion across its India operations through 2030.

Scale, Data Are New AI Currency

The surge of investment reflects something AI companies struggle to find elsewhere: large volumes of human-generated data.

Frontier AI model developers rely heavily on human text, images and interactions to train systems. But many existing datasets in Western markets have already been heavily mined. According to Bloomberg, the next wave of training data is likely to come from countries with massive populations adopting digital services for the first time.

India stands out because of its digital scale. The country has more than 700 million smartphone users and among the highest mobile data consumption rates in the world, according to Ericsson data cited by The Wall Street Journal.

That scale generates enormous volumes of digital activity. India already produces roughly 20% of the world’s data while storing only about 3% of it, according to CareEdge Ratings data cited in the Journal.

For Western technology companies, India has an additional strategic advantage. China, the only other market with comparable scale, has largely been closed to Western AI companies for years, making India one of the few remaining sources of massive new training data.

India’s data advantage also goes beyond sheer volume. The country has at least 121 major languages and extraordinary cultural and economic diversity, Bloomberg reported. Training AI systems on that variety of data can make models more robust when deployed across emerging markets.

Adoption rates are already rising quickly. Roughly 62% of Indians now use generative AI tools from at least one provider, as cited by the Journal.

Talent and Developers

India’s technology workforce is another major factor attracting global AI companies.

The country produces roughly 1.5 million engineering graduates each year, creating one of the world’s largest technical talent pipelines. In Stanford University’s Global AI Vibrancy Index, which evaluates talent, infrastructure and governance, India ranks third globally behind only the United States and China.

That workforce has long powered the global technology services industry. Now it is shifting toward AI development, machine learning engineering and data science roles.

Companies are already expanding their local presence to tap into that talent pool. Anthropic, for example, recently opened its first office in Bengaluru and said India has become the second-largest market for its Claude AI assistant after the United States.

Industry experts say the country’s talent base is particularly suited to working with AI systems that operate at large scale.“Strategically, not only is India a huge market, it also has the largest pool of skilled engineers and mathematicians to work on AI,” Saikat Datta, chief executive of DeepStrat, told Livemint.

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