India's Tata signs up OpenAI as customer for data centre business

NEW DELHI, Feb 19 (Reuters) - OpenAI will become the first customer of India's Tata Consultancy Services' data centre business, beginning with 100 megawatts of capacity, part of the global AI infrastructure initiative Stargate, the companies said.

Stargate is a $500 billion multi-year initiative to build AI data centres for training and inference, backed by major investors.

The deal is a major boost for TCS, which in a strategic shift last year disclosed plans to invest up to $7 billion in a 1 gigawatt data centre unit in India.

India has seen a surge in big-ticket AI infrastructure spending, with global players like Google GOOGL.O, Amazon AMZN.O, Meta Platforms META.O, and Microsoft MSFT.O, ramping up investments along with domestic companies such as Reliance RELI.NS, and Adani Group ADEL.NS.

Under a separate partnership, TCS parent Tata Group also plans to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise across the company over the next several years, starting with hundreds of thousands of employees. OpenAI is the parent company of ChatGPT.

India now has more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users, OpenAI said.