India, November 12, 2026: OpenAI has announced the launch of API inference residency in India, enabling eligible businesses and developers to process supported AI requests within the country. The offering, available initially for the GPT-6 Luna model, expands OpenAI’s data residency options in India and is aimed at supporting organisations with data localisation requirements.
The move allows Indian businesses and developers to run supported GPT-6 Luna workloads entirely in-country, addressing a key concern for sectors such as financial services that require local data processing for regulatory or operational reasons. The company said this capability is intended to help more organisations deploy AI for work that mandates in-country processing.
Support for data localisation
For supported workloads, both the processing of an API request and the model computation that generates its response will take place in India. Additionally, customer content is stored locally, which OpenAI said will help businesses use AI for tasks such as document summarisation, drafting responses, and information analysis.
Nitin Bawankule, Head of Enterprise – India at OpenAI, said, “Some Indian businesses have not fully deployed AI for important work because they need the information involved to be processed within the country. Local inference gives them more control over where supported workloads run and helps address a practical barrier to adoption.”
Broader India commitment and partnerships
The announcement follows OpenAI’s earlier launch of the OpenAI for India initiative, which covers AI infrastructure, enterprise adoption, skills development, and local partnerships. That initiative included a partnership with Tata Group to develop domestic AI data centre capacity. OpenAI also recently introduced similar residency capabilities for certain models on AWS Bedrock.
API usage and international rollout
The new API inference residency covers direct API usage, with local processing currently supporting GPT-6 Luna input and output through the Responses and Chat Completions APIs. Customers can access the service by creating a new API project with India selected for both storage and processing, using the India regional endpoint.
OpenAI’s API inference residency is also available in other regions, with recent introductions in Australia and Japan as part of this expansion.
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