The Gates Foundation will spend $1 billion on AI in clinics, classrooms and small farms.
Bill Gates gives the decision a clock: the next 12 to 18 months settle who this technology gets built for.
The Gates Foundation will spend at least US$1 billion over the next two years getting AI to people it hasn't reached. That's the announcement, made on September 14, 2026 from Seattle.
The money landed with the foundation's 10th annual Goalkeepers Report, called Make This Matter: AI, Equity, and the Choice We Can't Delay. Its argument is that AI's trajectory is not fixed (the report's phrase), and that the window to change it is short.
- Committed
- at least US$1 billion over the next two years
- Health care
- 40%, diagnostics and clinical decision-making support for frontline health workers
- Education
- 40%, AI tutoring and teaching tools for classrooms
- Agriculture
- 10%, advice customized to soil, weather, and crop conditions
- Digital foundation
- 10%, datasets in languages the tools do not yet understand
The case Gates makes
Bill Gates, the foundation's chair, writes that the foundation exists because of a market failure. People with the greatest needs have the least power over where investment goes. AI, he says, is doing the same thing at much greater speed.
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
The report picks three places to act. Only one carries a number, and it's language: more than 90% of the data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources. So the communities that stand to gain most from a good AI tool are the ones least present in what those tools learned from. Granted, that figure is about early models, and the release says so.
The other two asks are about who decides. Tools have to be built for the places they'll actually be used, with countries and communities controlling how their own data gets handled. And doctors, farmers and teachers need cheap enough access, plus the training to judge a tool for themselves. The report says technology companies will have to help with that part, alongside governments and philanthropy.
Left to the market, AI will be designed by and for the richest people in the world.
Where the billion goes
Health care and education take 40% each (the remaining fifth splits two ways). Health means diagnostics and clinical decision support for frontline health workers, maternal and newborn care, and the discovery of new drugs and vaccines. Education means AI tutoring and teaching tools, in US classrooms and abroad.
Agriculture gets 10%: advice for smallholder farmers, customized to their soil, weather and crop conditions. The last 10% goes to what the foundation calls the digital foundation, and the example it names is datasets in languages the tools don't understand yet. That's the 90% problem again, at a tenth of the budget, which seems thin to me. The foundation doesn't claim the money closes the gap, and it's asking other funders and technology companies to put in their own.
The clock is the part I didn't expect. Gates writes that the decisions made in the next 12 to 18 months, about how AI is built, funded, and deployed, will settle whether the technology mostly benefits people who already have the most.