Gates Foundation Commits $1 Billion to Expand Access to AI
The funding will focus on improving access to health, education, agriculture and local-language data over the next two years.
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The Gates Foundation will spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on artificial intelligence projects aimed at improving access to health care, education, agriculture and digital tools in underserved communities.
The commitment was announced alongside the foundation’s 2026 Goalkeepers Report, which argues that AI could widen existing inequalities if its benefits remain concentrated among wealthier users and institutions.
“The people with the greatest needs often have the least power to shape where innovation and investment go,” Bill Gates wrote in the report.
About 40% of the funding will go to education, including AI tutoring and teaching tools, while another 40% will support health care, including diagnostics, clinical decision support, maternal and newborn care and drug and vaccine development.
A further 10% will go to agriculture, including AI-based advice for smallholder farmers, and 10% will support digital infrastructure, including datasets for languages that are poorly represented in current AI systems.
The report said more than 90% of the data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources, limiting their usefulness in many regions.
The foundation is also working with major AI companies.
OpenAI has committed $50 million alongside the foundation to train health workers in Rwanda, while Anthropic is involved in work on vaccine development and agricultural data. Google.org and Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab are supporting projects focused on underrepresented African languages.
“We can harness AI for good. But it won’t happen by accident,” Gates wrote, calling on governments and technology companies to invest in broader access to the technology.
