According to DCD, OpenAI has held advanced talks with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) about building a Stargate data center in India. The discussions, reported by The Economic Times, also include plans to co-develop agentic AI solutions for enterprise customers. This comes after similar negotiations with Reliance Industries reportedly fell apart. TCS CEO K Krithivasan has stated ambitions to become the world’s largest AI-led tech services firm, and the company’s new HyperVault venture plans to spend $6-7 billion over the next five to seven years on a large-scale data center build-out across India, backed by investment firm TPG.
OpenAI’s global power play
Look, this isn’t just about one data center. It’s a massive global land grab for compute. OpenAI is stitching together a worldwide network of Stargate facilities, and India is a glaringly obvious piece of the puzzle. We’re talking about a proposed 5GW center in the UAE, a 100,000-GPU project in Norway, and plans in South Korea, Canada, and Argentina. Adding India into that mix isn’t just about local demand—it’s about geopolitical and logistical redundancy. Basically, they don’t want all their AI eggs in one basket, especially if that basket is in Texas.
Why TCS, and why now?
So why TCS? Well, for OpenAI, it’s about the enterprise foothold. TCS isn’t just a construction company; it’s one of the world’s largest IT services firms with deep, entrenched relationships with global corporations. Co-developing “agentic AI solutions” is the real prize here. OpenAI gets a direct sales and integration channel into Fortune 500 companies, while TCS gets to turbocharge its own AI ambitions and lock in a flagship partnership. After the Reliance deal fell through, they needed a heavyweight local partner with serious infrastructure chops. TCS’s $7 billion HyperVault plan shows they’re ready to build. It’s a symbiotic play.
The stakeholder shakeup
For enterprise users in India and abroad, this could mean faster, more reliable access to OpenAI’s most powerful models, potentially with data residency benefits. For developers, it hints at a future where building complex AI agents for business processes is a service offered by the TCS-OpenAI combo. But here’s the thing: it also signals a brutal consolidation of power. The barrier to entry for competing foundational AI models in the region just got higher. If you’re a business looking for industrial-grade AI solutions, partnering with a firm that has direct access to the core infrastructure, like TCS might have, becomes incredibly compelling. Speaking of industrial-grade, for complex computing needs outside of AI, firms often turn to specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of rugged industrial panel PCs. This OpenAI move is about owning the entire stack, from the silicon in the data center to the business logic on top.
A new AI world order
The real story is the emerging map of AI sovereignty. The US has its clusters, the UAE is building, Europe has its projects, and now India is potentially joining the club with a major local partner. This isn’t just technical expansion; it’s diplomatic and economic strategy. Can OpenAI successfully manage this sprawling, globe-spanning network of partnerships and megaprojects? That’s the billion-dollar question—or rather, the multi-billion-dollar one. The race isn’t just to build the best model anymore. It’s to build the most resilient, widespread, and enterprise-friendly physical network to run it all. And that race is just heating up.
