New Delhi: In a major relief for Indian companies, OpenAI has announced that it will now process artificial intelligence (AI) data locally in India. This means that when businesses use OpenAI’s tools, their sensitive data and computing operations, known as inference, will remain within the country instead of being sent to international servers.
Until now, many Indian companies, particularly those in financial services and banking, have been hesitant to fully adopt AI. Strict regulations require customer information to be stored and processed locally. With the introduction of API inference residency, businesses can now use AI for everyday tasks without concerns about their data crossing Indian borders. Both request processing and actual model computation will take place within the country.
Nitin Bawankule, Head of Enterprise – India at OpenAI, explained the impact of the development.
“Some Indian businesses have not fully deployed AI for important work because they need the information involved to be processed within the country,” he said.
“Local inference gives them more control over where supported workloads run and helps address a practical barrier to adoption. It gives more businesses a way to put OpenAI’s tools to work, and gives Indian developers and startups more scope to build for their own, and enterprise needs.”
At launch, local processing is available for the GPT-6 Luna model. Businesses can use it to accelerate text-based tasks, including summarising lengthy documents, drafting responses and analysing internal information.
To access the service, companies need to create a new API project on the OpenAI platform, select India as their region for both data storage and processing, and use the designated India regional endpoint.
Currently, the service supports GPT-6 Luna input and output through the direct Responses and Chat Completions APIs.
The launch is a major part of the “OpenAI for India” programme, introduced earlier this year to strengthen AI infrastructure and encourage enterprise adoption.
To enable local processing, OpenAI had previously partnered with the Tata Group to establish domestic AI data centres. Recently, OpenAI also introduced a similar local residency capability on AWS Bedrock.
India is a key market for the AI company, joining Australia and Japan in OpenAI’s recent global expansion of local processing tools.
