A new report from Microsoft’s AI Economy Institute highlights a stark divide in how artificial intelligence is being used globally. While AI tools have reached over 1.2 billion people in under three years — a pace described as the fastest for any general-purpose technology in history — the benefits are unevenly distributed. Nations with strong infrastructure and dominant languages lead, while others lag behind.
The report, titled “AI Diffusion Report: Where AI is most used, developed, and built,” ranks the United Arab Emirates at the top for AI adoption, with 59.4% of working-age adults using AI tools. Singapore follows closely at 58.6%, and Norway and Ireland round out the top four. The United States, despite its tech prominence, trails at 26.3%, while China sits at 15.4%. These figures suggest that AI’s reach is not just a matter of economic power but also of access and language.
Read Also: SC State Foundation Sues President Conyers Over Campus Turmoil
Microsoft’s analysis draws from anonymized data collected via over 1 billion Windows devices, allowing it to estimate AI usage globally. The firm acknowledges its dataset excludes non-Windows users, but claims the methodology accounts for that gap. A related technical report from Microsoft Research introduces a population-normalized metric to track AI usage across 147 economies, adjusting for device access and mobile scaling.
Despite rising internet access worldwide, the report underscores persistent digital divides. The International Telecommunication Union estimates 5.5 billion people are online in 2024, but about one-third of the world remains offline. Lower-income and rural populations face the greatest barriers to connectivity. Similarly, power access remains uneven, with the World Bank noting that low-income economies and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa have far lower electricity coverage than wealthier regions.
These gaps influence AI adoption rates, which the report frames in geographic terms. AI usage in the Global North is 23%, compared to 13% in the Global South. Compute resources, a foundation for advanced AI, are also unevenly distributed. The United States and China together account for 86% of global data center capacity, according to International Energy Agency estimates of 53.7 gigawatts and 31.9 gigawatts respectively.
The report also highlights a growing but still limited number of countries capable of building frontier-level AI models. Only seven nations are listed as hosting such models, with the U.S. leading at zero months from the frontier. China trails at 5.3 months, South Korea at 5.9 months, and Israel at 11.6 months. The performance gap is narrowing, but significant disparities remain.
Language barriers further complicate AI adoption, even when income and connectivity are accounted for. Countries with low-resource languages see significantly lower AI usage, the report argues. This is linked to the fact that widely used AI training data — such as Common Crawl’s corpora — are skewed toward a handful of dominant languages like English.
The report concludes that the value of AI will depend not on the number of models created but on how broadly they benefit society. It warns that without addressing infrastructure, language, and power access gaps, AI’s potential will remain untapped in large parts of the world. The full report is available on Microsoft’s website.
John K. Waters, editor in chief of Converge360.com sites, has covered AI and tech trends for over two decades. He also co-scripted the PBS documentary *Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance*.
Colleges are aligning recruitment, advising, and student services into a connected student lifecycle. This coordination helps institutions support students more effectively and work more collaboratively.
Institutions that are succeeding with AI share one thing in common, and it is not a better committee, a larger budget, or a more sophisticated technology stack. It is a president who never handed off the steering wheel.
Rubrik has announced the launch of Rubrik Data Protection for Google Workspace, a product the company said is designed to help enterprise customers protect data and restore operations across Google Workspace environments.
Institutions that want to maximize their research investments need a strategic management approach that balances preservation, accessibility, and security and satisfies stakeholders’ needs at the same time.