New Delhi: In the past few weeks, the world’s biggest tech companies have turned their gaze firmly toward India and this time, they are not selling anything. They are giving it all away.

OpenAI has rolled out a year of free ChatGPT Go. Google is offering 18 months of Gemini 2.5 Pro through Jio. In addition, Perplexity AI is extending free Pro access to Airtel users. Together, these three moves have quietly made India the world’s largest experiment in mass AI adoption, a billion people being handed premium AI tools at no cost.
But make no mistake, this isn’t charity. It’s one of the most calculated strategic plays in the history of technology.

For decades, India was seen as a “next big thing” market, promising but secondary. That story has changed.
With over 886 million internet users and counting, India is now the epicentre of global digital growth. Rural India alone accounts for more than half that number, and user growth is still accelerating.

For global AI companies, this scale is irresistible. India’s sheer diversity, linguistic, cultural, and behavioural, offers something the U.S. and Europe cannot: a live training ground for the world’s most ambitious AI systems.
If an AI can understand an Indian who mixes Hindi and English in one sentence, or answers in Guajarati but searches in Telugu, it can understand anyone. That’s why India matters more than any other market........

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