AI is spreading faster than electricity or the internet — but half the world can't join in, Microsoft report says (www.businessinsider.com)

Microsoft’s new "AI Diffusion Report" finds artificial intelligence is spreading faster than electricity, computers, or the internet—with more than 1.2 billion people now using AI tools—but the rollout is highly uneven and risks deepening global inequality. Adoption tops out in digitally mature countries (UAE 59.4%, Singapore 58.6%, Norway 51.9%), while large swaths of Sub‑Saharan Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin America show under 10% usage. Microsoft frames diffusion around three forces—frontier builders (model developers), infrastructure builders (compute/data centers) and AI users—and warns that without urgent investment the divide between “haves” and “have‑nots” will harden. The report highlights concrete bottlenecks: electricity and data‑center capacity matter as much as algorithms. The U.S. leads with 53.7 GW of data‑center capacity (China 31.9 GW, Germany 8.5 GW, UK 7.4 GW) while over 700 million people still lack reliable power. Language coverage is also skewed—most large language models are trained on English and other high‑resource tongues, leaving thousands of languages (e.g., Hausa, Bengali, Chichewa) effectively absent. Technically and socially, the takeaway is clear: scale compute and reliable power, expand internet/device access, boost digital skills, and invest in low‑resource language data to avoid cementing a new, long‑lasting AI divide.