Microsoft said it is aiming to address the imbalance in worldwide AI rollout by investing more than $50 billion in the Global South by the end of the decade.
The tech giant revealed the extent of its planned spending at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, following a flurry of funding moves by other companies on the opening day.
The Global South is considered to include the developing countries in the southern hemisphere, mostly located in Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America.
Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith went into detail on the company’s AI investment commitment in a blog post, written in tandem with vice president Natasha Crampton, titled: “We need to act with urgency to address the growing AI divide.”
Smith highlighted Microsoft’s own AI diffusion report, which reveals that AI use in the Global North is roughly twice that in the Global South and is continuing to widen, raising concerns that it will exacerbate the already significant financial gap between the two hemispheres.
To tackle this, Microsoft said it is implementing a five-point program that can bring the Global South up to speed, helping to provide a “real prospect for catch-up economic growth.”
The key elements Microsoft’s investment will focus on are: establishing AI infrastructure; teaching people AI skills; expanding multilingual and multicultural AI; enabling local AI innovations for community needs; and measuring AI diffusion to guide future investment.
In terms of infrastructure, Microsoft’s plans are well underway, spearheaded by a $17.5 billion investment in India the vendor revealed in December.
Microsoft also rolled out several new initiatives at the New Delhi conference, including the Elevate for Educators program for India’s schools, developed in tandem with country’s national education and workforce training authorities, which will see millions more students taught AI skills.
The vendor also pledged to focus on more inclusive, localized AI models in different languages to serve to countries in the Global South, addressing growing concerns of U.S. domination in AI that saw the Chilean government launch its own Latam-GPT model earlier this month. Microsoft also revealed it is investing in the Lingua France Africa initiative, to develop data and AI models for Africa. The program is in association with Masakhane African Languages Hub and the Gates Foundation.
In another move, Microsoft said its AI For Good Lab will use AI data to try to provide food security in sub-Saharan Africa, assisting communities with farming to prevent food shortages.
Microsoft also said it will increase its investment in research and data to better track AI diffusion in the future.
“The economic divide, the greatest divide between the Global North and South, started because of a technology divide. We cannot repeat that experience with AI,” Smith told the Economic Times of India.
