The Great AI Land Grab: Why OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity Are Giving Away Premium AI in India

A full-scale "AI war" has erupted in India, but instead of charging for advanced weapons, the world's biggest tech giants are giving them away for free. In a series of aggressive, head-to-head moves, OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity are offering their premium AI services—like ChatGPT Go and Gemini Pro—at no cost to hundreds of millions of Indian users.


This free-for-all is not an act of charity. It is a calculated, high-stakes battle for market dominance, with tech leaders deploying a strategy once perfected by India's own Reliance Jio: hook hundreds of millions of users with a free service, make it indispensable, and then monetize the habit.

A Battle for 800 Million Users
The competition is fierce and the timeline is compressed. The race began when the AI-powered search engine Perplexity partnered with Bharti Airtel, India's second-largest telecom operator, to offer its "Pro" version free for a year to Airtel's 360 million-plus subscribers.


Not to be outdone, Google, which views India as a critical market, struck a massive partnership with Reliance Jio, the nation's largest operator with over 500 million subscribers. This deal offers 18 months of free access to the "Google AI Pro" plan, which includes its top-tier Gemini 2.5 Pro model and 2TB of cloud storage.


Caught between two giants leveraging India's massive telecom networks, OpenAI—which counts India as its second-largest and fastest-growing market—was forced to respond. The company announced it would make its mid-tier "ChatGPT Go" plan free for one year to all new and existing users in India, a direct counter-move to prevent its rivals from cornering the market.


The Strategy: Why India? Why Free?
This AI "land grab" is driven by several critical strategic calculations:

Unprecedented Scale: India's vast, young, and digitally-native population represents the single largest growth opportunity for user acquisition on the planet. For these companies, capturing millions of users now is more important than immediate revenue.

The "Jio Playbook": The strategy mirrors how Reliance Jio disrupted the Indian telecom sector in 2016. By offering free data and calls, Jio acquired a massive user base that competitors could never reclaim. AI companies are betting the same logic applies: once users integrate a specific AI into their daily lives for a year, they will be more likely to pay when the free trial ends.

A "Golden" Distribution Channel: By bundling with telecoms, Google and Perplexity gain a "golden channel" to nearly 80% of India's internet users, an advantage a standalone app cannot match.

Training the Next Generation of AI: India's immense linguistic and cultural diversity is a goldmine for training data. Google, for instance, launched Gemini in India with support for nine local languages. An OpenAI executive was recently quoted saying, "if you build for India, you can build for the world."


Building Ecosystem "Lock-In": The goal is to move beyond simple chat. By offering AI integration into Google Workspace or research tools like NotebookLM, the companies are embedding their AI into the daily workflows of students and professionals. This creates high "switching costs," making it difficult for users to leave the ecosystem.


While Indian consumers benefit from a bonanza of free, powerful AI tools today, the real prize for tech companies is to become the indispensable, intelligent layer for the world's largest digital-first population—a prize they are willing to spend billions to win.