India Takes Top Spot In DeepSeek AI App Downloads: Report

India Takes Top Spot In DeepSeek AI App Downloads: Report

SUMMARY

India leads global downloads for DeepSeek's AI app with 15.6% share across platforms, making it the largest market for the Chinese chatbot

Krutrim becomes first Indian company to host DeepSeek's open source models on local servers, with prices starting at INR 10 per million tokens

The government plans to host DeepSeek locally as part of its data localisation efforts while building India's own low-cost AI model

Chinese artificial intelligence chatbot DeepSeek has become the most downloaded mobile app across 140 markets, with India contributing the largest pie of new users.

According to data from Appfigures, as cited by Bloomberg, India accounted for 15.6% of all downloads across platforms since the app’s launch in January and became the number one android app on the Google Play Store in the US this week.

Within 18 days of launch, DeepSeek garnered 16 Mn downloads, nearly doubling the initial adoption rate of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which saw 9 Mn downloads in the same period.

The app climbed to the top spot on Apple Inc’s App Store on January 26 and has maintained its position globally and became the top-ranking app on Alphabet Inc’s Google Play Store in the US as of January 28.

While officially available in China, US, and Vietnam, the app has gained widespread adoption across 140 markets despite minimal advertising.

This comes at a time when India is aiming to build a low-cost AI model, in line with DeepSeek. Also, yesterday, (January 31), Krutrim founder Bhavish Aggarwal announced that his AI unicorn has begun hosting DeepSeek’s open source models on Indian servers.

“Krutrim has accelerated efforts to develop world class AI. As a first step, our cloud now has DeepSeek models live, hosted on Indian servers. Pricing lowest in the world,” Aggarwal said in a post on X.

Krutrim currently hosts five DeepSeek models, including its flagship DeepSeek R1 and four distilled versions. The pricing ranges from INR 10 per million tokens for the R1-Distill-Llama-8B model to INR 60 per million tokens for the most expensive variant.

This also comes close on the heels of India advancing its data localisation efforts. Recently, union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that India would host DeepSeek on local servers to address privacy concerns regarding cross-border data transfer.

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India Takes Top Spot In DeepSeek AI App Downloads: Report-Inc42 Media
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