Microsoft plans to invest $50 billion in the Global South by the end of 2030
Microsoft on Wednesday said it is on track to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to expand artificial intelligence access across the Global South, warning that AI adoption in developed economies is running at roughly twice the pace seen in developing regions and that the gap is widening.
The announcement was made at the India AI Impact Summit by Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith and vice president and chief responsible AI officer Natasha Crampton. The executives called for urgent coordinated action to prevent what they described as a growing AI divide that could deepen global economic disparities.
In a company blog post released alongside the summit, the executives compared unequal AI access today to uneven electricity access in the past century, arguing that delayed diffusion of foundational technologies historically widened economic gaps between the Global North and Global South.
According to the company’s latest AI Diffusion Report, uneven AI adoption threatens to limit productivity growth and opportunity across developing markets. Microsoft said the planned $50 billion investment will be delivered through a five-part programme focused on digital infrastructure, skilling, multilingual AI development, local innovation ecosystems, and measurement of AI adoption outcomes.
Microsoft said it invested more than $8 billion in data centre infrastructure serving Global South regions in its last fiscal year, including projects in India, Mexico, and multiple countries across Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The company is also pursuing a target to extend internet access to 250 million people in underserved communities, including 100 million in Africa, and said it has already reached 117 million people on the continent through partnerships.
In addition, the company reported investing over $2 billion last fiscal year in cloud, AI, and digital skilling programmes across developing regions through grants, technology donations, and discounted products. Under its Elevate initiative, Microsoft has committed to helping 20 million people earn AI credentials by 2028.
In India, after training 5.6 million people in AI skills in 2025, the company set a goal of equipping 20 million people with AI capabilities by 2030. At the summit, it announced the launch of Elevate for Educators in India, aimed at strengthening AI capacity for two million teachers across more than 200,000 institutions and extending benefits to eight million students.
Highlighting language as a major barrier to AI adoption, Microsoft announced expanded investments in multilingual and multicultural AI systems. Its research division is collaborating with Indian institutions on community-centred AI evaluation tools and expanding content provenance standards with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity to support multiple Indic languages.
The company also said it is co-designing AI tools for agriculture in East Africa and South Asia, including speech recognition models for Kenyan languages and multilingual copilots for field use.
Citing developer ecosystem trends, Microsoft noted that India’s developer base is the world’s second largest on GitHub, with more than 24 million developers and the fastest growth rate among the top 30 global economies since 2020.
