The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced it will allocate $1.27 billion to expand access to artificial intelligence technologies in developing countries and poor regions, according to infohub.kz.
As The Straits Times reports, limited access to advanced technologies threatens to further widen the digital and economic divide between rich and poor nations.
The funding will be distributed across key social areas. About $400 million will go to healthcare projects, including AI systems to support medical workers and accelerate vaccine development. The same amount will be allocated to educational platforms for teachers. Another $100 million will support the agricultural sector and optimize farming.
Special attention will be paid to the language barrier: around $100 million will be spent on creating training datasets for rare and local languages of Africa and other regions.
To implement these initiatives, the foundation is collaborating with leading technology companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft.