Microsoft to invest $50 billion by 2030 to bridge global AI divide

Microsoft on Wednesday announced it is on pace to invest about $50 billion by the end of the decade to expand artificial intelligence infrastructure, skills and local innovation across countries in the Global South.

Announcing the plan at India’s AI Impact Summit, the US software 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.

Artificial intelligence usage in advanced economies is roughly double that in developing regions, Microsoft said, citing its latest AI Diffusion Report.

The company outlined a five-part strategy focused on infrastructure, skills development, multilingual AI, community-led innovation and tracking AI adoption to guide policy and investment.

Microsoft said it invested more than $8 billion in data centre infrastructure serving the Global South in its last fiscal year alone, including new facilities in India, Mexico and parts of Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

"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.

It is also working to expand internet access to underserved communities, targeting connectivity for 250 million people globally, including 100 million in Africa.

The company said it has already reached 117 million people through partnerships with regional network providers.

At the AI Impact summit, Microsoft announced a new education initiative under its Elevate programme, aiming to train two million teachers and help equip eight million students with AI skills.

The company said it invested more than $2 billion last year on grants, technology donations and training programmes for schools and nonprofits across developing markets.

Microsoft also unveiled new efforts to strengthen multilingual AI capabilities, citing investments in language data and evaluation tools to improve performance in underrepresented languages, particularly across Africa and Asia.

Microsoft said it is contributing data and research toward a forthcoming Global AI Adoption Index led by the World Bank, drawing on aggregated usage signals from its cloud services and developer platforms.

India now has 24 million developers on GitHub, making it the second-largest national community globally and the fastest-growing among major economies, Microsoft said.

“One thing that is clear this week at the summit in India is that success will require many deep partnerships,” the company said.