ADQ and Gates Foundation launch $40m AI edtech push in Africa

Most AI money right now is chasing cloud contracts and frontier models. This deal stands out because it pushes capital toward basic skills: teaching millions of children to read, count and interact with AI responsibly. By treating AI‑enabled learning platforms as critical infrastructure—on par with roads or power grids—ADQ and the Gates Foundation are betting that long‑term competitiveness in an AI world hinges on human capital, not just data centres.

For the race to AGI, the move is less about speeding up model capabilities and more about broadening who can benefit from them. If AI‑augmented EdTech can genuinely lift foundational literacy and numeracy across sub‑Saharan Africa, it changes the distribution of talent that can participate in building, governing and critiquing advanced AI systems. It also creates a testbed for what “responsible AI in classrooms” actually looks like, outside wealthy OECD contexts. That kind of evidence will matter as governments everywhere debate how aggressively to let AI into public education.