Gates Foundation Commits $1B Towards Equitable AI

The Gates Foundation today announced plans to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years to expand access to AI and the AI-enabled solutions, opportunities, and knowledge that have too often been out of reach for many around the world. The announcement comes as the foundation launches its 10th annual Goalkeepers Report, which this year focuses on the urgent actions needed to ensure that AI helps narrow gaps between the richest and poorest rather than widening them.

The 2026 report, Make This Matter: AI, Equity, and the Choice We Can’t Delay, makes the case that AI’s trajectory is not fixed. The window to influence who benefits, and how soon, is short. The report includes examples of foundation-supported partners that are already changing lives using AI in clinics and classrooms and on small farms.

“The Gates Foundation was created in part to address a basic market failure: the people with the greatest needs often have the least power to shape where innovation and investment go,” writes Bill Gates, Chair, Gates Foundation in the report. “Much of our work has been about closing that gap. AI presents the same challenge, only at much greater speed. Left to the market alone, the most capable tools will be built first for the people and institutions most able to pay for them—not necessarily for those who could benefit most.”

This commitment comes at a time when there are calls to slow down of AI developments. We are living at a time of unprecedented AI growth, and there is growing concern that AI is increasingly benefitting the elite, leaving those most in need of it, falling behind. The Goalkeepers Report identifies three areas where action now could help AI improve lives and livelihoods for more people in the years ahead:

• Make AI tools work in every language people speak. More than 90 per cent of the data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources, leaving many communities that could benefit from AI poorly represented in the data on which these tools were built.
• Build AI tools for the contexts in which people will use them. Effective tools require data and expertise from the places and populations they are intended to serve, with countries and communities deciding how data is managed and protected.
• Invest in people and access so communities can shape how AI works for them. Doctors, farmers, teachers, and developers need opportunities to learn how to evaluate AI tools and adapt what works to their own contexts. They also need affordable access to the technology, which will require action from technology companies as well as investment from governments and philanthropy.

Equitable access to the benefits of AI will not happen unaided. But, if AI tools are built with the expertise of the end users, they can put knowledge and advice in the hands of hundreds of millions of people who haven’t benefited from previous technology revolutions.

The funding will support partners already working to close the gaps in access to AI and to ensure that AI tools reflect the knowledge and priorities of the people who need them most. The $1 billion is set to help scale the work of those partners over the next two years, with the funding distributed roughly as follows across the foundation’s priority areas:

• 40 per cent to support education, including AI tutoring to help individualise student learning and teaching tools for use in US classrooms and abroad.
• 40 per cent to support health care, from diagnostics and clinical decision-making support for frontline.
• health workers to maternal and newborn care tools and the discovery of new drugs and vaccines
• 10 per cent for agriculture, including to help smallholder farmers get AI-generated advice customized to their soil, weather, and crop conditions.
• 10 per cent to build the digital foundation that equitable AI depends on, including datasets in languages the tools do not yet understand.

Behind each of these data points, the report acknowledges, “is a make-or-break moment for a family: a diagnosis made or missed, a harvest saved or lost, a child who learns to read or doesn’t. AI is arriving at a moment when conflict is growing, diseases are surging, and resources are constrained.”

The foundation is looking to work on this with others, calling on those who share the goal of making AI more useful, accessible, and affordable to invest their resources and expertise and use their voices. “We can harness AI for good. But it won’t happen by accident,” says Gates. “It requires a deliberate, specific commitment from government leaders and the companies developing the technology: to measure success not only by what AI can do for the most profitable users but by what it can do for the people who stand the most to gain.”