New Delhi, India – Microsoft has announced it is on track to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to expand artificial intelligence infrastructure and access across countries in the ‘Global South’, the company revealed at a major AI summit in India on Wednesday.
Okay News reports that the commitment, detailed in a company blog post, aims to address a widening “AI divide” where usage in the Global North is roughly twice that of developing nations. Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President of Microsoft, warned that without urgent action, unequal access to AI could exacerbate economic disparities, similar to how unequal access to electricity affected growth in the last century. The term ‘Global South’ broadly refers to developing, emerging, or lower-income countries, primarily located in the southern hemisphere.
The investment strategy is built on a five-part program to drive AI impact. This includes building essential infrastructure like data centers, empowering schools and nonprofits with technology and skills, strengthening multilingual AI capabilities to serve diverse populations, enabling local AI innovations to address community-specific needs, and creating metrics to measure AI diffusion and guide future policy. The plan builds on Microsoft’s previous substantial investments in key markets, including a $17.5 billion commitment to India announced last year.
A significant portion of the initiative focuses on skilling. In India alone, Microsoft trained 5.6 million people in AI skills in 2025 and has set a goal to equip 20 million Indians with essential AI capabilities by 2030. The company also stressed the importance of partnerships with governments, the private sector, and non-profits to ensure AI deployment is both inclusive and respectful of digital sovereignty needs.
What happens next hinges on the successful deployment of this AI infrastructure and the effectiveness of collaborative efforts to close the global skills gap. The company believes that if broadly adopted, AI infrastructure and tools could offer the Global South a significant opportunity for catch-up economic growth in the 21st century.
