Gates Foundation commits at least $1 billion to global AI access

The Gates Foundation committed at least US$1 billion over the next two years to expand access to artificial intelligence and AI-enabled tools worldwide. The foundation said it plans to allocate roughly 40% of the funding to education, 40% to health care, 10% to agriculture and 10% to digital foundations for what it calls equitable AI.

In education, the money is intended to support AI tutoring and teaching tools in US classrooms and other countries. The health care allocation covers diagnostics, clinical decision support, maternal and newborn care, and drug and vaccine discovery, the foundation said. The agriculture share is aimed at advice tailored to smallholder farmers’ soil, weather and crop conditions.

The commitment is global, not restricted to Africa. Africa is relevant to the foundation’s rationale because AI systems need locally representative data, language coverage and designs suited to the conditions in which they will operate. This worldwide commitment is distinct from narrower regional deployments, including OpenAI’s expansion of ad buying across India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

The foundation said the digital-foundations allocation will support datasets in languages that current tools do not adequately understand. Its three stated priorities are tools that work across languages, designs tailored to local contexts, and investment in people and affordable access so communities can help shape how the systems are used.

The foundation also said more than 90% of data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources. The reviewed materials do not provide enough methodology to reproduce that figure independently.

The announcement does not identify a complete list of grant recipients, individual award amounts or disbursement dates. It also provides no country-by-country or continent-by-continent allocation, so no Africa-specific funding total has been established.