New Delhi, Feb 18 (NationPress) The prominent US technology firm Microsoft announced on Wednesday its commitment to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to facilitate the adoption of AI in nations across the Global South.

According to Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President of Microsoft, alongside Natasha Crampton, Vice President and Chief Responsible AI Officer, AI utilization in the Global North is approximately twice that in the Global South.

“This gap continues to expand, affecting both economic development on a national and regional level, as well as the potential of AI to fulfill its broader promise of enhancing opportunities and prosperity worldwide,” they stated.

Smith acknowledged that the ‘India AI Impact Summit’ has appropriately prioritized this challenge.

“For over a century, unequal access to electricity has worsened the economic divide between the Global North and South. If we do not act swiftly, the growing AI divide will continue to exacerbate this inequality in the coming century,” he noted.

Microsoft also introduced Elevate for Educators in India to bolster the capabilities of two million teachers across more than 200,000 schools, vocational training centers, and higher education institutions.

“Our objective is to empower the nation's teaching workforce to lead confidently in an AI-driven future. This initiative will be executed in collaboration with India’s national education and workforce training authorities, providing equitable AI opportunities for eight million students,” the company mentioned.

Microsoft has crafted a five-part strategy to enhance AI impact: establishing the necessary infrastructure for AI dissemination; equipping individuals with technology and skills for schools and nonprofits; enhancing multilingual and multicultural AI capabilities; fostering local AI innovations that cater to community needs; and assessing AI diffusion to shape future AI policies and investments.

“It is evident from this week's summit in India that achieving success will necessitate numerous profound partnerships. These must transcend borders and unite individuals and organizations across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors,” the company emphasized.

In its previous fiscal year, Microsoft invested over $8 billion in data center infrastructure serving the Global South, which includes new developments in India, Mexico, and various countries in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

AI skills are fundamental in ensuring that AI broadens opportunities and enables individuals to pursue more impactful real-world applications.

“With the launch of Microsoft Elevate in July, we pledged to assist 20 million individuals in and beyond the Global South to obtain in-demand AI skilling credentials by 2028. Following the training of 5.6 million people in India by 2025, we escalated this commitment last December by setting a target to equip 20 million individuals in India with essential AI skills by 2030,” the company stated.

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

Samiksha incorporates local language usage, culturally specific communication norms, and locally relevant use cases directly into core testing artifacts by identifying failure modes often overlooked by English-first evaluations.

Furthermore, with 24 million members, the Indian developer community is the second largest national community on GitHub, where developers learn about and collaborate globally on AI.

This community is also the fastest-growing among the top 30 largest economies, with an annual growth rate exceeding 26 percent since 2020 and a recent surge of over 36 percent in annual growth as of Q4 2025,” Microsoft concluded.