India

India comes up on ToTheMoon when the AI conversation moves from models to scale: where a billion users will come from, where companies go for talent and manufacturing, and what the price of access decides. The hosts' question is less about the country itself than about what its size means for the strategies of OpenAI, Anthropic and Apple.

The first mentions in 2024 are audience numbers: in the discussion of Durov's arrest India is named Telegram's largest market with a hundred and four million users (episode 021), and episode 035 notes that expensive subscriptions cannot carry ChatGPT to a billion users — that requires Latin America, India and Indonesia, where price decides, pushing OpenAI toward subsidies in the manner of Shein or Temu. In 2025 the thread continues: fourteen thousand technical universities introduce AI (episode 057), Apple accelerates the move of plants from China to India (episode 056), and OpenAI introduces a special plan for the country while the hosts doubt its infrastructure (episode 072).

By late 2025 India is part of the talent-and-visa story: after the hundred-thousand-dollar limit on US work visas, Anthropic opened an office first in India and then in South Korea, which the channel reads as a sign that hiring into America has become expensive for the region (episode 084). In episode 150, in 2026, the hosts guess that a large share of a billion AI users comes from India and Southeast Asia, where voice input is especially popular, and in episode extra04 the country is part of a comparison of how states decide who sets the rules for AI in schools.