On OpenAI’s $110 Bn Stage, India’s Waiting In The Wings

The dust had barely settled on the India AI Impact Summit when OpenAI showed off its war chest this week. The $110 Bn fundraise is the largest private investment deal ever and takes OpenAI to a valuation of $730 Bn, just shy of the trillion-dollar mark. 

Amid all the concerns about the enormity and the scale of the AI challenge in front of India, this single deal serves as a signal that things are about to change even more rapidly than they have thus far. 

This AI war chest, filled by Amazon, SoftBank, and Nvidia, gives OpenAI and Sam Altman all the ammunition to fight off Anthropic, which has emerged as its biggest challenger in recent months. 

Anthropic and Claude have completely turned the AI narrative around, and while many dismissed OpenAI as just a chatbot in the past, the SaaSpocalypse set off by Claude Work is clear for all to see. And it’s in this context that OpenAI’s fundraising seems pivotal and more than just incidental. 

The Asymmetry Of Power

It is this financial asymmetry and the pace of disruption that should concern Indian companies — startups, IT giants and unicorns. Particularly, given the announcements made by Anthropic and OpenAI in recent months for the Indian market. 

India joined Pax Silica and looked to play a bigger role in the AI supply chain and deepen engagement on critical technologies and supply chain resilience. It’s a way to secure the AI future of the country. However, the sheer capital depth of US AI giants indicates that they will continue to dictate terms. 

Recent announcements, including the Stargate initiative involving OpenAI and the Tata Group and the expansion for both OpenAI and Anthropic in India, suggest that India’s role is crucial. Whether it is mission-critical to the AI supply chain is unclear for now. 

Building one gigawatt of data centre capacity through TCS’s HyperVault is a serious deal, but many say that India is just an infrastructure destination. Real sovereign AI capability will still take years to emerge.

In the wake of the AI Impact Summit and all it represented, the stock of AI in India has undoubtedly grown. But while everyone is talking about the disruption by Claude and ChatGPT, very little attention is being paid to homegrown models. 

This ‘neglect’ was most evident at a recent industry event hosted in Delhi after the India AI Impact Summit. A gaggle of CTOs went into great detail describing their modular approach to AI, their AI orchestration playbooks and the cost rationalisation. The models on their lips were all global. Not one mention of Sarvam or CoRover or BharatGen. 

This is the soft display of the asymmetry of power. Indian models are consigned to afterthoughts right now.   

OpenAI plans to spend a projected $665 Bn on computing costs over the next five years. Amazon is pouring $138 Bn into server infrastructure for OpenAI alone. 

Anthropic has raised more than $50 Bn since September 2025, and daily signups to Anthropic’s Claude chatbot have tripled since November, the company told US publication The Information in a report earlier this week. Paid subscribers are said to have more than doubled since October 2025, while free users have grown by 60% in February. 

But this is still quite some way behind OpenAI’s lead. ChatGPT has close to 910 Mn weekly active users, and Google’s Gemini, which has 750 Mn monthly active users, according to the report. 

OpenAI can casually consider offering $30 Bn to acquire Cursor or snap up one of the biggest AI disruptors in recent times — OpenClaw and its creator. 

Indian AI models have just begun to fight against this might. 

And yes, all of this seems a bit like what we wrote around the AI Summit. But the criticality of swift action is getting more and more evident with each passing week. 

The Indian government’s bullishness about attracting billions in funding, huge investment by Reliance and the Adani Group, as well as the $1.2 Bn fundraise by AI infrastructure startup Neysa all seem like a drop in the proverbial ocean when OpenAI raises as much money as all Indian startups have raised since 2014 — $100 Bn vs the $165 Bn invested in Indian startups as of 2025.  

 The numbers only serve to show how uneven the playing field is. 

The Light-Speed Disruption

The arrival of this “war chest” comes at a precarious moment. The so-called “SaaSpocalypse” of February 2026, triggered by Anthropic’s latest product suite, wiped out more than $400 Bn in market cap from Indian IT majors like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro. Then a similar blow was dealt to cybersecurity stocks. 

Who’s up next?   

One can only imagine how much worse things are set to get. Mass layoffs at Meta, xAI, Amazon, Block and other tech giants have taken the global tally in 2026 to 30,000 layoffs, according to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi. This heat will be felt by Indian companies in the near future. 

This is not to say India is failing. Far from it. The India AI Summit 2026 showcased a vibrant undercurrent of Indian AI-native innovation. Companies like Sarvam AI are operating on weekly sprints, matching the global tempo, but the race for adoption is skewed in favour of trillion-dollar AI companies.    

Beyond Sarvam, others are also waiting in the wings. Sarvam is first among the chasing pack from India, behind OpenAI, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Anthropic and the global giants. Plus, the fact is that some Indian startups are so deeply entrenched in India’s digital commerce landscape that OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic have no option but to partner with these companies. 

Razorpay, PineLabs, JioHotstar, Paytm, PhonePe, and Swiggy, among others, have all enabled ways to work with these chatbots, but this does not seem as significant as some of these have made it out to be. It’s a matter of positioning for many, not a real meaningful play. 

Many more such tie-ups will come up in the future. The NPCI is also in talks to bring UPI to chatbots; digital commerce is moving towards agentic commerce. Chatbots are slowly creeping into everyday transactions, currently driven by fintech and banking apps. 

There’s little doubt that AI in India is progressing faster than ever. New models are being rewarded, and investors are bullish about what they see from the ecosystem. It’s just a question of whether this ambition can stand firm in the long run against OpenAI’s seemingly endless runway. 

For now, the big opportunity in India is in the application layer, and AI’s ripple effects are currently being most noticeably felt by legacy tech. How long before the disruptive forces of Anthropic or OpenAI’s tools start doing the same for today’s AI application makers and Indian startups that are currently partners? 

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