OpenAI opens its first office in the Americas outside the US, in Sao Paulo

OpenAI has launched commercial operations in Brazil with a new office in Sao Paulo, its first physical presence in the Americas outside the United States, backed by a roster of named local corporate and institutional partners.

What's new

OpenAI describes the move as a long-term commitment, with CEO Sam Altman saying: "This is a long-term commitment to working alongside the Brazilian ecosystem to ensure that AI creates meaningful economic and social value across the country." The Sao Paulo office will host a local team working directly with Brazilian businesses, developers, researchers, and public institutions.

OpenAI is backing the expansion with specific numbers: Brazil is one of ChatGPT's three largest markets by weekly active users, with that user base nearly doubling over the past year, and people in Brazil now send roughly 215 million messages to ChatGPT every day. By number of developers building on the OpenAI API, Brazil ranks second globally. OpenAI also names a slate of new institutional and corporate partners tied to the expansion, including Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica (ITA), Instituto de Matematica Pura e Aplicada (IMPA), Hospital das Clinicas da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Sao Paulo (HCFMUSP), Brazilian legal-AI unicorn ENTER, Estimulo, the City of Sao Paulo and its Prodam technology agency, and local partners Adapta and Brendi.

Context

The Brazil office follows OpenAI's pattern of opening local footholds in its fastest-growing markets rather than serving them purely from the US — it made a similar push into India this year with a first local office and hiring drive, and has separately rolled out ChatGPT ads to Brazil alongside the UK, Mexico, Japan, and South Korea. Brazil's rapid ChatGPT adoption, combined with a large developer base already building on the API, made it a logical next stop as OpenAI competes for enterprise and government AI contracts against Google and Anthropic in Latin America.

Why it matters

A physical office with named hospital, university, and government partners signals OpenAI is moving past selling API access into deeper, sector-specific deployments — healthcare, legal services, public administration — that require local relationships and, often, local data-handling commitments. For a market where ChatGPT usage has nearly doubled in a year, a dedicated local team also gives OpenAI a head start on the kind of government and enterprise procurement relationships that are hard to build without a physical presence, at a moment when Google, Anthropic, and Chinese labs are all racing to secure footholds in the same fast-growing markets.