Microsoft is contextualizing the India AI Impact Summit in the broader context of the Global South, citing investments of $50 billion 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 twice as much artificial intelligence (AI) as countries in the Southern Hemisphere. The planned investment relies on a five-part program, including building AI infrastructure, providing technology and skills to schools and nonprofits, developing multilingual and multicultural AI capabilities, and fostering local AI innovations that meet community needs.
Brad Smith, vice president and president of Microsoft, says, “The India AI Impact Summit rightly puts this challenge at the center of its agenda. For more than a century, unequal access to electricity has driven a growing economic gap between the global North and South. Unless we take urgent action, the growing AI divide will perpetuate this disparity into the century to come.” This warning about usage lag underlines Microsoft’s message at the summit.
Microsoft explicitly compares the spread of AI to electrification, one of the defining infrastructure expansions of the 20th century. Just as unequal access to electricity has reinforced the economic gap between North and South, Microsoft warns that unequal access to AI could reinforce a new form of structural inequality for decades to come.
The comparison between electricity and AI may be a rhetorically effective message, but one has utility while the other does not. The analogy also obscures key realities – AI access is not just a factor of infrastructure, but also of compute concentration. Second, most of today’s AI footprint is concentrated among a few companies with the largest models, AI chips, and cloud platforms. The public is unlikely to own critical infrastructure.
“We are investing in AI infrastructure with sensitivity to digital sovereignty requirements. We recognize that in a fragmented world, we must provide customers with attractive choices for the use of our offerings. This includes sovereign control in the public cloud, private sovereign offerings, and close collaboration with national partners,” says Natasha Crampton, Microsoft’s vice president and chief responsible AI officer.
Access to infrastructure has historically been one of the most durable predictors of long-term economic growth, and barriers to AI adoption include reliable electricity, connectivity, computation, skilled workers, and software in local languages.
The five-part program that Microsoft cites includes an annual investment of $8 billion in cloud and AI data centers, including in India; Microsoft Elevate for Educators training for 2 million teachers in India; Investing in language data and model capabilities, including LINGUA Africa; and co-designing AI Trek for agricultural assistance in East Africa and South Asia.
“As India’s guiding principles for the AI Impact Summit recognize, AI should be applied to solve serious challenges in collaboration with people and organizations in the Global South. Microsoft’s increased investments prioritize locally defined problems, locally-based expertise and real-world impact,” says Smith.
Microsoft’s commitment to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade may seem transformative for the Global South’s position relative to the Global North, but these investments will flow primarily into data centers, proprietary AI tools, and enterprise partnerships – and the potential for platform lock-in at the regional level remains. There has to be greater investment in open model ecosystems, local model training capabilities, and sovereign AI.
The Skills and Education pillar, driven by the Microsoft Elevate program, targets 20 million AI credential earners by 2028, with the aim of equipping 20 million people in India with AI skills by 2030.
Microsoft emphasizes that accelerating the availability or diffusion of AI will require a clear understanding of where and how AI is being used, as well as the gaps that exist. “At 24 million, the Indian developer community is the second largest national community on GitHub, where developers learn about and collaborate with the world about AI. The company says the Indian community is the fastest growing among the top 30 largest economies, growing by more than 26 percent each year since 2020 and compounded by more than 36 percent in annual growth by Q4 2025.”
Microsoft’s contribution to the upcoming World Bank Global AI Adoption Index, partly building on GitHub and Azure Foundry’s privacy-preserving signals, creates a shared empirical baseline that can guide more targeted interventions across the region.
While the company is committed to tracking AI proliferation, the metrics for success on its $50 billion investment remain unclear. Data center investments are measurable, but any impact on actual human development outcomes is far more difficult to describe. Second, while there appears to be a commitment to digital sovereignty, there is the possibility that national AI infrastructures will be built on a single hyperscalar cloud, which could create structural dependencies over time. This is also where questions about interoperability, reversibility, data localization, and long-term pricing come into play.