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The Gates Foundation, the philanthropy funded by American billionaire Bill Gates, will spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on artificial intelligence tools for health workers, farmers and teachers, largely in the world's poorest countries.
The money will fund training AI models on local languages, health applications, educational tools and advisory systems for smallholder farmers, uses the foundation argues the commercial market will not serve on its own.
The commitment was announced alongside the foundation's 2026 Goalkeepers Report, titled Make This Matter: AI, Equity, and the Choice We Can't Delay, which warns that AI could widen global inequality rather than narrow it.
"AI could be a great equalizer or widen the gap," Gates writes in the report. His central claim is one of timing: that decisions taken over the next 12 to 18 months about how AI is built, funded and deployed will determine whether it primarily serves people who already have the most, or reaches those with the least. The report's premise is that the technology's direction is not fixed, and that the window to influence it is short.
The foundation already has AI programmes running in Africa. In January it committed $50 million with OpenAI to a multi-year rollout of digital health tools across 1,000 clinics by 2028, a project called Horizon 1000, beginning in Rwanda as a testing ground before expanding. Gates visited Rwanda in July to review it.
The scale is set by a larger commitment. In May 2025 the foundation said it would spend more than $200 billion over two decades and close in 2045, doubling its rate of giving; Gates said the following month that most of that would be directed toward Africa. A $1.4 billion agricultural commitment for Africa and Asia followed in November 2025.
Gates has also been publicly uneasy about AI. In August he warned that world leaders were unprepared for its risks.
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