The Gates Foundation put at least $1B behind equitable AI on September 14, 2026, a two-year push to widen access.
The money accompanies the tenth edition of Goalkeepers, the foundation’s yearly scorecard, this year titled Make This Matter: AI, Equity, and the Choice We Can’t Delay.
Gates writes that the foundation exists partly to correct a market failure: those with the deepest needs hold the least sway over where money and invention head. Left alone, the market builds the strongest systems for whoever pays first.
The report showcases foundation-backed partners already using AI in clinics, classrooms and on small farms, and argues that tools built with their users’ expertise can reach hundreds of millions missed by earlier technology waves.
The report sets three priorities. Early large language models drew more than 90 percent of their training data from English sources, so tools should work in every language people speak. They also need to fit the places where they get used, with countries and communities deciding how local data is handled, and teachers, doctors, farmers and developers need chances to judge which tools to trust and to afford them.
Education and health each take about 40 percent, funding tutoring, classroom tools, frontline diagnostics, maternal and newborn care and the search for new drugs and vaccines. Agriculture gets 10 percent for smallholder farmers; the final 10 percent builds digital foundations such as datasets in languages today’s tools do not handle.
Gates wants government leaders and AI developers to judge themselves on how much the technology helps those with the most to gain, not what it earns from big spenders.
The foundation is also pressing other funders to add money and expertise, framing the moment as closing: AI investment pools in rich health systems while global health budgets tighten.
