OpenAI announces data residency for ChatGPT Enterprise in India

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has announced data residency in India for its select offerings to meet the local data sovereignty requirements. In an announcement, OpenAI said that data residency will be available for ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and the API Platform in Asian countries such as India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea.

This data residency builds on its existing enterprise-grade data privacy, security, and compliance features. Until the recent announcement, most of ChatGPT's servers were housed in data centers in Texas, USA. To support users around the world, including in India, OpenAI relies on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud services.

“Data residency builds on OpenAI’s robust data privacy, security, and compliance features, which support hundreds of organisations partnering with OpenAI across Asia today—from start-ups and large enterprises to academic institutions—including Kakao, SoftBank, Grab, Singapore Airlines, and many more,” the company said in a statement.
New ChatGPT workspaces can be set up to store customer content at rest in the region. This includes users’ conversations with ChatGPT and custom GPTs in Enterprise or Edu workspace, including user prompts, uploaded files, and content across text, vision, and image modalities.
Further, for API Platform, eligible users can enable data residency by creating a new project in the dashboard and choosing the relevant country. As of now, data storage for the API platform will be stored in the selected region, OpenAI said. 

OpenAI is offering data privacy and security features, such as advanced encryption techniques like AES-256; support for regulatory compliances such as GDPR and CCPA; data protection addendum; and no training on customer data. 

OpenAI is rapidly expanding its footprint in India, which has become its second-largest and fastest-growing market globally. In 2024, the number of Indian users tripled, company chief Sam Altman said earlier.