Microsoft has a billion-dollar plan to end inequality in Latin America. And it is to expand AI, of course

50 billion dollars. This figure that seems so impossible to contextualize is the amount of money that Microsoft is going to invest in what they have dubbed the ‘plan’Global South by 2030‘. And like almost everything that has to do with Microsoft for a few months now, it is focused on one thing: improving access to AI in the countries of the ‘Global South‘.

In short. This week, during the AI ​​Impact Summit in New Delhi, Microsoft president presented a plan to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to improve access to artificial intelligence in developing countries and emerging markets.

Brad Smith said they want to sustain the long-term growth of those countries as part of his company’s effort to address a problem they have detected: the growing digital divide between developed and developing nations. There may be many other gaps beyond access to AI, but Smith is convinced that what is urgent is to accelerate the adoption of AI in regions of India, Africa and Latin America.

This ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ thing is not a geographical issue. It is an economic division

The plan. The intention of Microsoft is “to make the dissemination of AI real and at scale, so that communities have what they need to access that tool, that they trust it and can apply it to local priorities.” The legs of that plan are:

• Empower schools and nonprofit organizations through technology and digital skills.
• Strengthen multilingual and multicultural artificial intelligence capabilities.
• Enable local AI innovations to meet community needs.
• Measure the spread of AI to guide future policies and investment.

Let it be used more. With this, Microsoft hopes that AI will penetrate more into these territories because, according to an internal report on the spread of artificial intelligence, while 24.7% of the working-age population in the Global North uses generative AI tools, in the Global South only 14.1% use it. According to Smith, developing economies cannot miss out on those productivity advantages that come with AI.

AI and hunger in Africa. But it is not the only thing that Microsoft has recently presented that seeks to position AI as a catalyst for change. With the ambitious title of ‘Stop malnutrition with AI’, the American company has presented a project to improve food security in sub-Saharan Africa.

Starting in Kenya, the idea is that institutions have access to tools that offer information to predict and prevent food shortages and predict, with AI, the risks that this implies for health. If you are raising an eyebrow like “thank goodness we now have AI to give us the solution to a problem that we already know”, here at least there is no talk of Generative AIbut rather a model that collects all the data and reflects it on a map so that organizations have more detailed information.

Data centers. These 50,000 million are added to other previous billion-dollar investments that Microsoft had already done in countries like BrazilIndia or South Africa, but there is something more than “digital empowerment”. The initiative includes building AI infrastructure, and that means one thing: building data centers. This infrastructure requires an immense amount of energy to satisfy the needs of the digital infrastructure, but they also need water and Mexico and South American countries are directly mentioned as home to some of the new data centers.

Microsoft has been testing for some time more sustainable data center designsbut precisely in developing places, energy and water are resources that, perhaps, are not abundant.

Images | Specialgst, Microsoft

In Xataka | What is happening in the US is a warning for Spain: data centers driving up electricity bills in homes