NEW DELHI, Feb 18: Microsoft on Wednesday said it is on pace to invest USD 50 billion by the end of the decade to expand artificial intelligence access across the Global South, as it warned that AI adoption in the Global North is roughly twice that of the Global South and the gap is widening.
Announcing the plan at the India AI Impact Summit, the tech giant’s vice chair and president Brad Smith and vice president and chief responsible AI officer Natasha Crampton said urgent action is needed to prevent a growing AI divide from deepening global economic disparities.
“The India AI Impact Summit rightly has placed this challenge at the center of its agenda. For more than a century, unequal access to electricity exacerbated a growing economic gap between the Global North and South. Unless we act with urgency, a growing AI divide will perpetuate this disparity in the century ahead,” they wrote in a blog.
According to Microsoft’s latest AI Diffusion Report, uneven adoption of AI risks limiting economic growth and opportunity in developing regions.
“This week in Delhi, we’re sharing that Microsoft is on pace to invest USD 50 billion by the end of the decade to help bring AI to countries across the Global South,” they wrote.
The USD 50 billion commitment will be deployed through a five-part programme focused on infrastructure, skilling, multilingual AI development, local innovation and measurement of AI adoption.
Microsoft said it invested more than USD 8 billion in datacentre infrastructure serving the Global South in its last fiscal year, including in India, Mexico and countries across Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The company is also pursuing a goal to extend internet access to 250 million people in underserved communities, including 100 million in Africa. It said 117 million people across Africa have already been reached through partnerships, and it is nearing its global target.
The company said it is balancing digital sovereignty needs with commitments to cybersecurity, privacy and resilience, while supporting cross-border investment flows.
Microsoft said it invested more than USD 2 billion last fiscal year in cloud, AI and digital skilling programmes across the Global South, including grants, technology donations and discounted products.
Under its Microsoft Elevate initiative, the company has committed to helping 20 million people earn AI credentials by 2028. After training 5.6 million people in India in 2025, it set a goal to equip 20 million people in India with AI skills by 2030.
At the summit, Microsoft announced the launch of Elevate for Educators in India, aimed at strengthening the AI capacity of two million teachers across more than 200,000 institutions and expanding access to eight million students.
Highlighting language barriers as a major constraint on AI diffusion, Microsoft announced expanded investments in multilingual and multicultural AI systems.
Microsoft Research is also advancing community-centred AI evaluation tools in collaboration with Indian institutions, and expanding content provenance standards with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), including support for multiple Indic languages.
Microsoft said it is also co-designing AI tools for agriculture in East Africa and South Asia, including speech recognition models for Kenyan languages and multilingual copilots.
Citing developer ecosystem data, the company said India’s 24 million-strong developer community is the second largest on GitHub and the fastest growing among the top 30 economies, with annual growth exceeding 26 per cent since 2020. (PTI)
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