The Gates Foundation said on Tuesday it would spend at least USD 1 billion over the next two years to widen access to artificial intelligence, a bold bet that the technology can narrow rather than widen the gap between rich and poor countries.
The commitment was unveiled alongside the foundation’s 10th annual Goalkeepers Report, titled “Make This Matter: AI, Equity, and the Choice We Can’t Delay.” The report argues that the window to shape who benefits from AI, and how quickly, is closing fast.
Under the plan, 40% of the money will go to education, including AI tutoring designed to individualize student learning and teaching tools for classrooms in the United States and abroad. Another 40% is earmarked for health care, spanning diagnostics, clinical decision support for frontline health workers, maternal and newborn care tools, and drug and vaccine discovery.
A further 10% will support agriculture, including AI-generated advice tailored to smallholder farmers’ soil, weather and crop conditions. The remaining 10% will fund digital infrastructure, such as building datasets in languages current models do not yet understand.
The Gates Foundation AI strategy rests on three priorities set out in the report: making tools work in every language people speak, designing them around the contexts where they will actually be used, and investing in the people and access needed for communities to shape the technology themselves.
More than 90% of the data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources, the report said, leaving many communities poorly represented in the systems built on that data. It also calls for countries and communities to decide how their own data is managed and protected.
Bill Gates, chair of the foundation, wrote that the organization was created in part to address a basic market failure, in which those with the greatest needs have the least power to steer innovation and investment. AI presents the same challenge, he wrote, only at far greater speed, because the most capable tools will be built first for those most able to pay.
“We can harness AI for good. But it won’t happen by accident,” Gates wrote, adding that success should be measured not only by what AI does for the most profitable users but by what it does for the people who stand to gain the most.
The foundation said its funding would scale up partners already working to close access gaps, with examples cited from clinics, classrooms and small farms. It also urged technology companies, governments and other philanthropies to commit resources, expertise and public advocacy, noting that affordable access will require action from industry as well as public investment.
The Seattle-based foundation is led by Chief Executive Mark Suzman under the direction of Gates and its governing board. Goalkeepers is its campaign to accelerate progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
