From the article that @satishwe posted, it looks like they are planning to locate some of their servers in India - at least enough to serve Indian users of ChatGPT. These are likely to be inference servers only.
It remains to be seen whether they will outsource this to someone (from the list of companies mentioned) or operate it themselves. If they are planning to operate it themselves, it could be that they just buy a company outright or buy some assets.
No chance ChatGPT would want to operate Data Centers. Their main focus will be buildin and refining their models. It will definitely go downstream to these AI cloud companies
OpenAI will 100% eventually operate all their data centers as it is their biggest expense. They have already committed $500B to build out data centers (Stargate) and buying stakes in small nuclear power companies.
When you are spending billions on training and inference costs every year, the savings are huge when use your own infrastructure instead of hyperscalers. It’s only that OpenAI is growing so fast that they can’t build out their own infrastructure fast enough and need to use hyperscalers to meet some of the demand.
