AI Is Hyper-Scaling Digital Inequality
AI is deepening the digital divide, with compute and skills concentrated in a few countries and regions. While some nations like Indonesia and South Africa try to build local AI capacity, most remain consumers of imported systems, risking economic and technological marginalization.
Artificial intelligence is becoming part of everyday infrastructure, but its benefits are unevenly distributed, amplifying existing inequalities in connectivity, skills, and institutional capacity. According to Stanford's AI Index, the US hosts over 5,000 data centers, more than 10 times as many as any other country, and World Bank data indicates the US accounted for roughly 87% of global cloud computing and data-storage exports in 2023. In OECD countries, only about 40% of adults have more than basic digital problem-solving skills, and AI-related training is strongly stratified by education: 36% of those with tertiary education undertook AI training, versus 18% with upper-secondary. South Africa's draft national AI policy was withdrawn after AI-generated hallucinated citations were discovered, illustrating capacity gaps. Indonesia's BRIN is building practical AI tools like satellite-based fish-finding for fishermen and multilingual language models for Javanese and Sundanese, aiming to train 100,000 AI workers annually. Regional cooperation, such as the African Continental AI Strategy and the Kigali Global AI Summit, explores ways to reduce dependence on external AI systems. The core issue is not just access but participation in shaping what AI is for and which priorities it serves.
- Abbreviations
- OECD = Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development — Организация экономического сотрудничества и развития
- BRIN = National Research and Innovation Agency — Национальное агентство исследований и инноваций Индонезии
Source: IEEE Spectrum AI —
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