"Embed AI in the smartphones of 1.4 billion people."
Global big tech corporations are accelerating a first-mover race in the Indian market with ultra-low-cost artificial intelligence (AI) plans and large-scale infrastructure investments. Google on the 10th (local time) launched a new subscription product, AI Plus, in India that can be used for $5 a month (about 7,000 won) or less, moving to target the mass market. OpenAI earlier released a low-cost product, ChatGPT Go, lowering the price floor for paid AI plans to around $5.
Google AI Plus is a low-cost AI plan offered in India at 199 rupees a month (about $2.21) for the first six months, and 399 rupees a month (about $4.44) thereafter. Compared with the existing subscription product AI Pro (1,950 rupees a month), the promotional price is about one-tenth, which many see as pricing aimed squarely at ChatGPT Go. It offers the latest language model, Gemini 3 Pro, along with an image editing model, video generation features, and deep research features based on NotebookLM, and it bundles 200GB of cloud storage used across Google Photos, Drive, and Gmail. Analysts see this as a so-called lock-in strategy to keep Android users tied to Google services.
In addition to ChatGPT Go, which increases the limits for messages, image generation, and file uploads by about tenfold compared with the free version, OpenAI is pursuing first-mover gains by offering up to one year free through certain partnerships. AI search startup Perplexity teamed up with Indian carrier Airtel to offer one year free of its Pro plan, and Google also partnered with India's largest carrier, Reliance Jio, to provide 18 months of free AI Pro to subscribers of certain 5G plans, intensifying a carrier-bundle battle for subscribers.
On the surface, it looks like a price war over consumer AI plans under $5 a month, but behind it lies a long-term power struggle to lock in India's AI and cloud infrastructure. Amazon said it will invest an additional $35 billion in India's AI, cloud, and logistics infrastructure by 2030 to create 1 million jobs. Microsoft (MS) released a $17.5 billion investment plan—Asia's largest—right after Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella met with India Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the 9th. Google also announced it will spend $15 billion to build a facility in the southern city of Visakhapatnam as a global AI hub and data center. The three corporations' recently released India-focused investment plans total $67 billion (about 95 trillion won).
The biggest reason big tech corporations are courting India so heavily is that the country has emerged as a base for a post-China strategy. Amid U.S.-China tensions and China's opaque regulatory environment, U.S. IT corporations are seeking a production and technology hub to replace China, and India is attracting large-scale investment with its English-speaking workforce, vast consumer market, and policies emphasizing Data Sovereignty. The Indian government is encouraging domestic processing of citizens' data and key industry data whenever possible, promoting the construction of hyperscale data centers and a so-called sovereign cloud. A multilingual and multicultural environment, including Hindi and English, is seen as a suitable testbed for trying out and tuning global AI models.
By contrast, copyright and data regulation could pose potential risks for big tech. The Indian government recently formally proposed requiring AI corporations to pay a portion of revenue as royalties for content used to train models and to distribute it to creators. This differs from the U.S. approach, where platforms argue that learning from publicly available online materials is close to fair use and fight it out in court, and from Japan's model, which broadly allows exceptions for text and data mining. It also takes a different tack from the European Union (EU), which lets copyright holders request in advance to opt their content out of AI training.
The Motion Picture Association (MPA) and India's IT industry group NASSCOM are pushing back, calling it a "tax on innovation." The Indian government argues that, given the nature of massive AI datasets, a system where individual creators selectively demand the cessation of use of only their works is not practically workable. If this is combined with data localization mandates already in place or under discussion in some areas, the expense structures and profitability of global AI corporations seeking to enter the Indian market will inevitably become even more complex.
Industry watchers say this three-way competition in India over pricing, investment, and regulation will serve as a test bed for the future global AI order. If sub-$5 monthly AI plans become the de facto standard in India, and a royalty and Data Sovereignty model is institutionalized, it could significantly influence regulatory and pricing policies in other emerging and Asian markets.