OpenAI Enables Local Data Storage In India

Artificial Intelligence giant OpenAI has launched data residency in India and other Asian countries, including Japan and South Korea, enabling these regions to store data locally. 

This will help Indian users meet local data sovereignty requirements while using OpenAI products – OpenAI API, ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Edu. 

For the application programming interface platform, OpenAI API and ChatGPT for businesses, ChatGPT Enterprises, data is owned by the user and remains confidential.

With data residency, the data control by the organisations and businesses will be enhanced in the aforementioned countries.  

“Data residency builds on OpenAI’s existing enterprise-grade data privacy, security, and compliance features,” the company said. 

While ChatGPT Enterprise is a version of ChatGPT, customised for businesses, offering security, privacy, and management features, ChatGPT Edu is built for universities to deploy AI to campus operations and assist students, faculty and researchers with artificial intelligence. 

Notably, the OpenAI API is a set of tools that allows developers to access and use OpenAI’s models within their own applications by integrating advanced AI capabilities like text generation and natural language processing in their projects. 

On the API platform, “eligible customers can enable data residency by creating a new project in the API Platform dashboard and selecting the relevant country. As of now, data storage for the API platform will be stored in the selected region,” it said. 

The development comes at a time when the Sam Altman-led company is planning to set up data centre operations in India.

OpenAI is in initial discussions to set up the data centre in the country, Business Standard reported earlier this year. 

Besides, OpenAI and social media major Meta are reportedly looking to strike partnership with Indian conglomerate Reliance on new AI businesses. 

As per The Information, sources said that US-based company is looking to partner with Reliance’s telecom arm Jio to distribute or sell its AI offerings, including ChatGPT.

The talks reportedly saw Reliance, which also offers cloud, considering a proposal to sell OpenAI’s models to its enterprise customers through an API. However, the deal may see the involvement of Microsoft, which has the exclusive rights to resell OpenAI models to businesses through an API.

Earlier this year, the GenAI giant also rolled out its AI agent “Operator” in multiple countries, including India, for its Pro users amid the rise of agentic AI worldwide. 

Operator is an AI agent from OpenAI which can perform several tasks for the user. For instance, it can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling. 

OpenAI is also caught in a legal tussle with Indian media agency ANI and other media outlets and publications. ANI filed a lawsuit before the Delhi High Court (HC) against OpenAI last year for use of copyrighted material by the AI company to train their foundational models. 

However, OpenAI earlier this year told the Delhi HC that it does not use the content of Indian media groups to train its AI chatbot ChatGPT.