Janet Ogundepo
The Gates Foundation has announced plans to invest at least $1bn over the next two years to expand access to artificial intelligence and AI-enabled solutions, opportunities and knowledge that have been left out of reach for many around the world.
The foundation announced this on September 15, 2026, at the launch of its 10th annual Goalkeepers Report, which focuses on actions needed to ensure artificial intelligence helps reduce, rather than widen, gaps between the rich and poor.
The 2026 report, titled Make This Matter: AI, Equity, and the Choice We Can’t Delay, noted that the direction of AI development was not fixed and that action was needed to determine who would benefit from the technology and how soon.
The report said the foundation-supported partners are already using AI in clinics, classrooms and on small farms to improve lives and livelihoods.
The report identified three areas where action could help ensure that AI benefits more people in the coming years.
In the report, the chair of the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, noted, “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.
“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.”
He called for the development of AI tools that work in the languages spoken by people around the world, noting that more than 90 per cent of data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources.
The foundation said this had left many communities poorly represented in the data used to develop AI tools.
The report also called for AI tools to be developed for the specific contexts in which they would be used, stressing the need for data and expertise from the countries and populations those tools were intended to serve.
The report further called for investment in people and access so that doctors, farmers, teachers and developers could learn to evaluate AI tools and adapt them to their respective contexts.
The foundation said affordable access to AI would require action from technology companies as well as investment from governments and philanthropic organisations.
Under the new commitment, 40 per cent of the funding will support education, including AI tutoring to individualise student learning and teaching tools for use in the United States and other countries.
Another 40 per cent will be directed to healthcare, including diagnostics, clinical decision-making support for frontline health workers, maternal and newborn care tools, and the discovery of new drugs and vaccines.
Ten per cent will support agriculture, including AI-generated advice for small holder farmers based on their soil, weather and crop conditions, while another 10 per cent will be used to build the digital infrastructure required for equitable AI, including datasets in languages that AI tools do not yet understand.
The foundation said the funding would support partners already working to close gaps in AI access and ensure that AI tools reflect the knowledge and priorities of the people who need them most.
The foundation also called on governments, technology companies and others to invest resources and expertise towards making AI more useful, accessible and affordable.
Gates said, “We can harness AI for good. But it won’t happen by accident.
“[I]t 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.”
He added that government leaders and technology companies needed to measure the success of AI not only by what it could do for profitable users, but also by what it could do for people who stood to benefit most.
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