OpenAI appoints former Uber India chief Prabhjeet Singh as managing director for India

OpenAI has named Prabhjeet Singh, the former President of Uber India and South Asia, as its Managing Director for India. The appointment, effective September 2026, puts a veteran of large-scale operations in charge of one of the company’s most strategically important growth markets.

Singh spent roughly 11 years at Uber, departing on June 26, 2026.

Why India, why now

India is already OpenAI’s second-largest user base globally. ChatGPT ranks among the most downloaded apps in the country, with over 100 million weekly active users.

On February 18, 2026, during the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, the company launched its “OpenAI for India” initiative. The program covers enterprise adoption, workforce upskilling, and partnerships with major Indian corporations.

The most notable of those partnerships is with Tata Group, one of India’s largest conglomerates, focusing on AI infrastructure.

OpenAI is also planning new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru for 2026, targeting both enterprise clients and the developer community.

The Singh playbook

Singh’s background is particularly well-suited for this role. An alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad, two of India’s most prestigious institutions, he spent over a decade building Uber’s presence across India and South Asia.

OpenAI faces significant competition in India’s AI market. Google, Microsoft, and Meta are all investing heavily in the region, and homegrown AI startups are multiplying rapidly.

India has 22 officially recognized languages and hundreds of dialects. OpenAI’s sovereign AI infrastructure ambitions in India suggest the company is thinking about this seriously, building AI systems that process and store data locally rather than routing everything through US data centers.

What this means for the broader tech landscape

The absence of any crypto or blockchain component in OpenAI’s India strategy is worth noting. Despite growing interest in decentralized AI and blockchain-based inference networks, OpenAI is sticking firmly to traditional tech infrastructure.

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