Microsoft outlines $50 billion AI push across the Global South, launches educator program in India

Company sets out five-part plan focused on infrastructure, skills, language inclusion, local innovation, and adoption metrics, with new commitments for India’s teachers and developers.

Microsoft has confirmed it is on pace to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to accelerate AI adoption across the Global South, unveiling a five-part program that spans infrastructure, skilling, multilingual AI, local innovation, and measurement of AI diffusion.

Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President at Microsoft, took to LinkedIn from Delhi and wrote: “Today in Delhi, we’re sharing that Microsoft is on pace to invest USD $50 billion by the end of the decade to help bring AI to countries across the Global South. Our five-part program is designed to make AI diffusion real at scale, so communities have what they need to access AI, trust it, and apply it to local priorities, with progress they can track.

In India, that includes training 5.6 million people in 2025 and a goal to equip 20 million Indians by 2030, including through Microsoft Elevate for Educators, supporting two million teachers across 200,000+ schools.”

The announcement, made during the India AI Impact Summit, positions AI diffusion as the next major global development challenge. Microsoft’s AI Diffusion Report shows AI usage in the Global North is roughly twice that of the Global South, with the gap widening. The company argues that without urgent intervention, the AI divide risks reinforcing long-standing economic disparities.

According to Microsoft’s five-part framework, the strategy is structured around infrastructure, skills, multilingual capability, locally defined AI innovation, and the measurement of adoption trends.

Building infrastructure for AI diffusion

Microsoft says infrastructure remains the prerequisite for AI diffusion, requiring reliable electricity, connectivity, and compute capacity. In its last fiscal year, the company invested more than $8 billion in datacenter infrastructure serving the Global South, including in India, Mexico, Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

Alongside datacenters, Microsoft is working toward a goal of extending internet access to 250 million people in unserved and underserved communities, including 100 million in Africa. The company says it has already reached 117 million people across Africa through partnerships including Cassava Technologies and Mawingu.

The program also emphasizes digital sovereignty. Microsoft states it is offering sovereign controls in the public cloud, private sovereign options, and collaboration with national partners. It highlights commitments to cybersecurity, privacy, and resilience, alongside the formation of a Trusted Tech Alliance announced at the Munich Security Conference, bringing together 16 technology companies across 11 countries.

The tension is clear: Global South markets require foreign direct investment to build infrastructure at scale, while governments increasingly prioritize national control over digital assets.

Scaling AI skills for schools and nonprofits

Beyond infrastructure, Microsoft says it invested more than $2 billion last fiscal year in programs supporting schools and nonprofits across the Global South, including financial grants, technology donations, skilling programs, and discounted products.

Central to this is Microsoft Elevate, launched in July, with a commitment to help 20 million people earn in-demand AI credentials by 2028. In India alone, Microsoft trained 5.6 million people in 2025 and has set a target of equipping 20 million Indians with AI skills by 2030.

As part of this, Microsoft has launched Elevate for Educators in India, designed to strengthen the capacity of two million teachers across more than 200,000 schools, vocational institutes, and higher education institutions. The program is being delivered in partnership with national education and workforce training authorities, with the stated aim of expanding AI opportunities to eight million students.

The initiative includes educator credentials, a global professional learning community, AI Ambassadors, Educator Academies, AI Productivity Labs, and Centers of Excellence. Microsoft says it will equip 25,000 institutions with inclusive AI infrastructure and integrate AI learning pathways into major government platforms.

For EdTech providers, this scale of educator training signals a shift from experimental AI pilots toward systemic integration within teacher workflows and national platforms.

Multilingual AI and local innovation

Microsoft identifies language as a core barrier to AI diffusion. It is investing in upstream language data and model capability, including LINGUA Africa, a $5.5 million open call led by the Masakhane African Languages Hub, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, the Gates Foundation, and the UK government.

The program prioritizes responsibly sourced text, speech, and vision data, targeting underrepresented African languages in sectors such as education, food security, health, and government services.

The company is also expanding multilingual and multicultural evaluation tools, including support for major Indic and Asian languages in MLCommons’ AILuminate benchmark. A pilot dataset of 7,000 text-and-image prompts for Hindi, Tamil, Malay, Japanese, and Korean is being developed in collaboration with academic and government partners.

Through Microsoft Research, initiatives such as Samiksha and Project Gecko aim to co-design AI systems with local communities in East Africa and South Asia. The Paza family of automatic speech recognition models supports six Kenyan languages, while PazaBench benchmarks performance across 39 African languages.

A separate AI for Good Lab pipeline adapts open-weight large language models for low-resource languages including Chichewa, Inuktitut, and Māori.

Measuring AI adoption at scale

The fifth pillar focuses on tracking AI diffusion. Microsoft is contributing adoption metrics through GitHub repositories and Azure Foundry to support the World Bank’s forthcoming Global AI Adoption Index.

India’s developer ecosystem plays a central role. With 24 million developers, India has the second-largest national GitHub community globally and is the fastest growing among the top 30 largest economies, with annual growth above 26 percent since 2020 and over 36 percent growth as of Q4 2025. Indian developers rank second globally in open-source contributions, GitHub Education usage, and contributions to public generative AI projects.

Microsoft argues that measuring diffusion, rather than simply announcing investments, is essential to shaping policy and tracking progress.

From commitment to execution

The $50 billion headline figure positions Microsoft as a major private-sector investor in AI infrastructure and skills across emerging markets. The practical impact, however, will depend on execution across infrastructure build-out, educator training, language inclusion, and local innovation partnerships.

For the education sector, the emphasis on teacher skilling, multilingual AI, and measurable adoption suggests that AI diffusion is moving from national strategy documents into operational programs that schools, universities, and workforce systems will need to absorb.

The question now is not whether AI will reach the Global South, but how evenly and how effectively it will be deployed.

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