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India Is Now the Most Active LLM Market as AI Firms Pile In

2 min read

12/18/2025

India has become the most active market for large‑language models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, turning the country into a proving ground for how consumer AI will scale — and how companies will compete for usage and data. (bloomberg.com)

India Is Now the Most Active LLM Market as AI Firms Pile In: India has become the most active market for large‑language mode…

What Happened

AI providers are flooding India with aggressive promotions to lock in users. Google is offering its premium Gemini AI Pro plan at no extra cost for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio customers, while OpenAI has rolled out a year of free ChatGPT Go access in the country. Perplexity’s Pro tier is also being bundled at no cost for Airtel users, part of a broader push to seed daily habits. (blog.google)

So far, the strategy appears to be working. Sensor Tower data cited by Reuters shows a surge in daily active users: ChatGPT daily users hit 73 million in India, up 607% year-over-year and more than twice the U.S. base. Gemini’s daily users in India reached 17 million, compared with 3 million in the United States — making India the biggest market by daily users for both services. (reuters.com)

Why India Leads

Several factors make India uniquely fertile for AI adoption: a smartphone base of roughly 730 million devices, rock‑bottom data costs, and a population comfortable mixing languages in everyday conversation. Analysts say the free plans are not just about sign‑ups; the multilingual, code‑mixed queries generated by Indian users can help models learn faster by filling critical training gaps. (reuters.com)

Google’s telecom tie‑ups and student offers underscore the scale of this bet. Gemini AI Pro is free to Jio users for 18 months, and Google separately offered a one‑year AI Pro subscription to college students to deepen adoption. OpenAI, for its part, formalized a local education initiative and noted that India hosts the largest student population on ChatGPT globally. (blog.google)

What’s Next

Expect more India‑first features, regional‑language improvements, and carrier partnerships as platforms compete on speed, reliability and value. Privacy will be a parallel flashpoint: some users welcome the freebies but worry about how their interactions train the models, a tension AI firms will need to address through clearer controls and transparency. (reuters.com)

For now, the calculus is clear: India offers unmatched volume, linguistic diversity and growth potential — and the companies that win here could shape how consumer AI evolves everywhere. OpenAI made ChatGPT Go free in India for 12 months starting November 4, 2025, signaling how central the market has become to AI product strategy. (help.openai.com)