Microsoft is referencing the India AI Impact Summit within the broader context of the Global South while mentioning a $50 billion investment by the end of the decade. To support this point, the tech giant cites its latest AI Diffusion Report, which indicates that the Global North uses artificial intelligence (AI) twice as much as countries in the southern hemisphere. The planned investments hinge on a five-part programme, including building AI infrastructure, providing technology and skills for schools and nonprofits, developing multilingual and multicultural AI capabilities, and fostering local AI innovations that address community needs.
“The India AI Impact Summit rightly placed this challenge at the centre of its agenda. For more than a century, unequal access to electricity exacerbated a growing economic gap between the Global North and South. Unless we act with urgency, a growing AI divide will perpetuate this disparity in the century ahead,” says Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft. This alarm about usage gaps underlines Microsoft’s messaging at the summit.
Microsoft explicitly compares AI’s diffusion to electrification, one of the defining infrastructure expansions of the 20th century. Just as unequal access to electricity entrenched economic gaps between the North and South, Microsoft warns that unequal access to AI could cement a new form of structural inequality for decades to come.
Comparisons between electricity and AI may be rhetorically effective messaging, but one is a utility while the other is not. The analogy also obscures key realities — AI access is not just a factor of infrastructure, but also of compute concentration. Secondly, most of today’s AI footprint is concentrated among a few companies across the largest models, AI chips, and cloud platforms. Critical infrastructure for the masses is unlikely to be proprietary.
“We’re investing in AI infrastructure with sensitivity to digital sovereignty needs. We recognise that in a fragmented world, we must offer customers attractive choices for the use of our offerings. This includes sovereign controls in the public cloud, private sovereign offerings, and close collaboration with national partners,” says Natasha Crampton, Vice President and Chief Responsible AI Officer of Microsoft.
Infrastructure access has historically been one of the most durable predictors of long-run economic development, and the barriers to AI adoption include reliable power, connectivity, compute, skilled workers, and software in local languages.
The five-part program that Microsoft refers to includes $8 billion in annual investments in cloud and AI data centres, including in India; Microsoft Elevate for Educators training for 2 million teachers in India; investments in language data and model capabilities, including LINGUA Africa; and co-designing AI Trek for agriculture support in East Africa and South Asia.
“As India’s guiding sutras for the AI Impact Summit recognise, AI must be applied to address pressing challenges in collaboration with people and organisations in the Global South. Microsoft’s increasing investments prioritise locally defined problems, locally grounded expertise, and real-world impact,” Smith notes.
Microsoft’s commitment to invest $50 billion through to the end of the decade may sound transformative for the position of the Global South relative to the Global North, but these investments will primarily flow into data centres, proprietary AI tools, and enterprise partnerships — and the likelihood of platform lock-in on a regional scale remains a possibility. There will have to be greater investments in open model ecosystems, local model training capabilities, and sovereign AI.
The skills and education pillar, anchored by the Microsoft Elevate program, targets 20 million AI credential earners by 2028, with a goal of equipping 20 million people in India with AI skills by 2030.
Microsoft insists that accelerating the availability of AI, or diffusion, will require a clear understanding of where AI is being used and how, as well as the gaps that persist. “At 24 million, the Indian developer community is the second largest national community on GitHub, where developers learn about and collaborate with the world on AI. The Indian community is also the fastest growing among the top 30 largest economies, with growth at more than 26 percent each year since 2020 and a recent surge of over 36 percent in annual growth as of Q4 2025,” the company says.
Microsoft’s contribution to the forthcoming World Bank Global AI Adoption Index, built partly on privacy-preserving signals from GitHub and Azure Foundry, creates a shared empirical baseline that could guide more targeted interventions across the sector.
While the company commits to tracking AI diffusion, metrics for success on the $50 billion investment remain vague for now. Data centre investments are measurable, but any impact on actual human development outcomes is far harder to attribute. Secondly, while there seems to be a commitment to digital sovereignty, the prospect that national AI infrastructures will be built on a single hyperscaler’s cloud could create structural dependencies over time. This is also where questions about interoperability, reversibility, data localisation, and long-term pricing come into play.
