Microsoft's $50 Billion AI Push Aims to Bridge Global South Digital Divide

Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President of Microsoft and Natasha Crampton, Vice President and Chief Responsible AI Officer of Microsoft, said in a blog post that AI usage in the Global North is roughly twice that of the Global South.

"And this divide continues to widen. This disparity impacts not only national and regional economic growth, but whether AI can deliver on its broader promise of expanding opportunity and prosperity around the world," they wrote.

Smith said the 'India AI Impact Summit' has rightly placed this challenge at the centre 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," he mentioned.

Microsoft also announced the launch of Elevate for Educators in India to strengthen the capacity of two million teachers across more than 200,000 schools, vocational institutes, and higher education settings.

"Our goal is to help the country's teaching workforce lead confidently in an AI‑driven future. The program will be delivered in partnership with India's national education and workforce training authorities, expanding equitable AI opportunities for eight million students," the company said.

Microsoft has devised a five-part programme to drive AI impact: Building the infrastructure needed for AI diffusion; Empowering people through technology and skills for schools and nonprofits; Strengthening multilingual and multicultural AI capabilities; Enabling local AI innovations that address community needs; and Measuring AI diffusion to guide future AI policies and investments.

"One thing that is clear this week at the summit in India is that success will require many deep partnerships. These must span borders and bring people and organisations together across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors," the company noted.

In its last fiscal year alone, Microsoft invested more than $8 billion in data centre infrastructure serving the Global South. This includes new infrastructure in India, Mexico, and countries in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

AI skills are foundational to ensuring that AI expands opportunity and enables people to pursue more impactful real-world applications.

"With the launch of Microsoft Elevate in July, we committed to helping 20 million people in and beyond the Global South earn in-demand AI skilling credentials by 2028. After training 5.6 million people across India in 2025, we advanced this work by setting a goal last December to equip 20 million people in India with essential AI skills by 2030," said the company.

Microsoft Research is also advancing Samiksha, a community-centered method for evaluating AI behaviour in real-world contexts, in collaboration with Karya and The Collective Intelligence Project in India.

Samiksha encodes local language use, culturally specific communication norms, and locally relevant use cases directly into core testing artifacts by surfacing failure modes that English-first evaluations routinely miss.

Moreover, at 24 million, the Indian developer community is the second largest national community on GitHub, where developers learn about and collaborate with the world on AI.

The Indian community is also the fastest growing among the top 30 largest economies, with growth at more than 26 per cent each year since 2020 and a recent surge of over 36 per cent in annual growth as of Q4 2025," said Microsoft.

- IANS