Amid growing global conversations around equitable technology access, Microsoft has unveiled a major investment initiative aimed at reducing the widening artificial intelligence gap between developed and developing regions. The announcement was made during the India AI Impact Summit, where the company highlighted concerns that unequal AI adoption could deepen future economic disparities.
Microsoft said it plans to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to expand AI access across countries in the Global South. In a blog post, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith and Chief Responsible AI Officer Natasha Crampton noted that AI adoption in the Global North is nearly 2 times higher than in the Global South, warning that the gap could impact economic growth and equal opportunity.
Speaking at the summit, Smith said unequal access to transformative technologies — similar to electricity in the past century — could shape global inequality if not addressed quickly.
The company also launched ‘Elevate for Educators’, a programme designed to strengthen the capabilities of 2 million teachers across more than 2 lakh schools, vocational institutes, and higher education institutions in India. The initiative aims to extend AI learning opportunities to nearly 8 million students through collaborations with national education and workforce training authorities.
Microsoft outlined a 5-point strategy to accelerate AI diffusion, focusing on infrastructure development, expanding skills through schools and nonprofits, strengthening multilingual AI, supporting local innovation, and improving measurement systems for policymaking.
The company revealed it invested over $8 billion in data centre infrastructure serving the Global South in the last fiscal year, covering India, Mexico, Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
Microsoft also aims to help 20 million people globally gain AI skills by 2028 and plans to equip 20 million people in India with essential AI skills by 2030. The company said 5.6 million people in India were trained in 2025.
Additionally, Microsoft Research is developing Samiksh, a community-centred AI evaluation framework built with Indian organisations to include local languages and cultural contexts often overlooked in English-focused testing. India currently has 24 million GitHub users, making it the world’s 2nd-largest developer community and the fastest growing among the top 30 economies.
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