- Ensuring the Global South has a place in the AI boom will require those countries outside of today’s AI hotspots to pool their resources, with each providing part of a recipe that includes computing power, investment, and people.
Artificial intelligence offers immense opportunity, but it’s expensive to build and requires very resource-intensive data centers to run.
This need for resources threatens to repeat the connectivity deficit between wealthy and other nations unless government, business and international organizations make a concerted effort to include the so-called Global South in AI’s development, says Deemah AlYahya, secretary general of the Digital Cooperation Organization.
“We have 2.6 billion people today who are not even connected. They don’t even have devices, they’re off the grid. So imagine, how are they going to use AI?” AlYahya told the Coins2Day Most Powerful Women Summit in Riyadh. “Last year alone, there was a $300 billion investment in AI. But how many countries? A handful of countries are investing, and a handful of countries are innovating. That means that there’s a huge portion of the world that don’t even have access to such technology.”
Founded in 2020 with five members—Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, and Pakistan—the DCO aims to narrow the digital divide and ensure technology drives prosperity and opportunity for all countries. It is now turning its focus to drafting a new AI Treaty.
The keys to narrowing the AI divide before it becomes a chasm, AlYahya told the MPW event, is to decentralize computing power across states and develop shared talent pools across countries.
“We believe that every country has its competitive advantage,” AlYahya said, noting that member states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar have the resources to invest in computing power, while others could be better suited to provide talent, local content and innovations.
As an example of such coordinated work between the Global South, AlYahya points to an AI healthcare initiative that has pulled together seven scientists—one from Nigeria, one from Pakistan, one from Morocco, one from Jordan, and three from Saudi Arabia—along with local computing power to build a company that can be monetized and scaled.
“We’re creating new frameworks for intellectual property and also to share local content between countries,” she said.
The DCO now has 16 members, encompassing a population of 800 million people.