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at an ai summit held at the united nations earlier today, u.s. secretary of state antony blinken announced $100 million in funding and private sector commitments in partnership with the u.s. agency for international development (usaid) to help expand access to ai technologies around the world.

secretary blinken was joined by executives from openai, nvidia, amazon, microsoft, ibm, anthropic, jacaranda health, google, and meta, who announced their respective companies’ initiatives to expand the use of ai globally to ensure that communities around the world can benefit from the technology that has taken wall street and the broader tech sector by storm since 2022.

secretary blinken’s announcement is part of the state department’s partnership of global inclusivity on ai. ai data centers are at the heart of training models like openai’s chatgpt, which require billions of dollars in data center investments that are often out of reach for organizations with limited resources.

blinken shared that inclusiveness will help ai effectively help humanity solve problems such as "rising temperatures, deadly viruses...food insecurity," making making ai inclusive "not an act of generosity" but one that is in "our national interest, in the interest of our companies, entrepreneurs and investors."

the new partnership will focus on ai compute, capabilities, and environments. investments in compute will enable developers in low- and middle-income countries to develop ai models and applications tailored to local needs. investments in ai capabilities will allow countries to "really build capacity" so more people can "use and adapt ai tools." finally, in terms of context, blinken added that this will enable localized solutions to cater to localized datasets.

as for funding, blinken revealed that his department and usaid "will invest $33 million in u.s. foreign assistance in ai development." of that, $10 million will go to expanding access. in addition, congress will provide $23 million "to build on our efforts to develop a safe, secure, and trustworthy ai governance framework, to use ai to advance human rights and development priorities, and to promote education and cultural exchange on ai-related topics." blinken said total funding commitments under the public-private partnership will reach $100 million.

later, openai ceo sam altman announced at the event that the company will launch the openai academy to provide developers and organizations in low- and middle-income countries with access to openai technology and training. microsoft president brad smith shared that microsoft has pledged to spend more than $12 billion to build artificial intelligence data centers in latin america, southeast asia, and africa. smith also said that microsoft will also provide $500 million in free access to more than 30,000 nonprofit organizations in the global south.

google plans to increase the number of supported languages ​​for google translate to more than 1,000 soon, according to james manyika, google's senior vice president of technology and society. google deploys ai flood forecasting tools to cover nearly 500 million people worldwide.

joelle pineau, meta's vice president of ai research, said meta will invest more than $10 million in 2024 and 2025 to support open source ai innovation to increase the use of ai in communities in latin america, africa and asia. ned finkle, nvidia's vice president and head of global government affairs, said nvidia will invest $10 million per year to improve the skills of ai developers in emerging countries.