Gates Foundation and Google to Bring AI resources to 200 Million Farmers Across the Global South

Google and the Gates Foundation have directed more than $100M in combined funding and dedicated technical support from Google researchers to deploy real-time climate, agricultural, and language AI tools.

MOUNTAIN VIEW & SEATTLE (Friday, 18 September) — The Gates Foundation and Google today unveiled an expanded initiative to bring advanced AI tools to 200 million smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, helping them anticipate climate risks, improve farm productivity, and build resilience in a changing climate.

The multi-year roadmap will scale AI applications from an initial reach of 50 million farmers to 200 million smallholders across critical climate-adaptation and food-security challenges. To support this expansion, the Gates Foundation and Google have contributed $100 million in combined funding and dedicated research and engineering support to organizations delivering scaled impact.

“No matter where they farm, people deserve access to the weather, crop, and soil information that can mean the difference between a good harvest and a failed one. When that information reaches farmers at scale, it’s transformational for their families, their communities, and their economies. We’re proud to work with Google, agricultural partners, and governments across Africa and South Asia to put AI to work solving a problem that climate change is making more urgent,” said Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation.

“Our collaboration with the Gates Foundation is about turning the extraordinary potential of computational science into solutions that can make a real difference in people’s lives,” said Maggie Johnson, Global Head and Vice President of Google.org. "That means going beyond building AI for the Global South to building it alongside the people and communities it is designed to serve. Together, we’re connecting frontier AI with the farmers who feed a third of the world.”

Smallholder farmers produce nearly 35% of the world’s food across more than 500 million farms, most of them smaller than two hectares. Yet they remain highly exposed to increasingly unpredictable weather and often lack access to the satellite data, financial services, and public support that can help them prepare and respond. The Gates Foundation and Google will continue to deploy these foundational initiatives to address these barriers:

Supporting local ecosystems

Funding, computing resources, and technical support will be directed to local researchers and innovators, including Wadhwani AI and Digital Green in India, with the goal of keeping talent, data governance, and intellectual property anchored in the regions where these solutions are developed and deployed.

Micro-climate precision

Smallholder farmers are highly exposed to weather volatility, yet the sophisticated forecasts available to meteorologists often do not translate into practical, farm-level decisions. This partnership will help close that gap by integrating advanced AI forecasting directly into TomorrowNow, an operational climate platform co-funded by the Gates Foundation, the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and Google.org.

Making smallholder farms visible

Smallholder farms account for an estimated 85% of agricultural holdings worldwide, yet their small and irregular plots can be difficult to identify using conventional satellite imagery. This can make it harder for farmers to verify their land and crop cycles when applying for government programs, insurance, or subsidized inputs. The initiative addresses this gap through the Agricultural Understanding Platform, an AI foundation model suite for farmers, government agencies, and companies designed to map field boundaries at sub-meter resolution and monitor crops throughout the growing season.

Google is pairing overhead imagery from third party providers with AI to map smallholder fields and identify crops without costly manual surveys, while the Gates Foundation is funding partners that support local imagery collection and working with agricultural ministries and CGIAR research centers to prioritize key staple crops. The Agricultural Land Use (ALU) data layer, already among the most accessed layers on Google Earth and part of Earth AI, now spans India, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, with deployments also underway across Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Rwanda, Zambia, and Nigeria. This work enables farmers to get more custom weather alerts and access additional support such as government credits.

Accelerating agricultural innovation

The $100 million commitment is supporting regional research and infrastructure, including work with CGIAR to accelerate the development of crop varieties designed to withstand drought, heat, and disease. 

The initiative will also support open-source speech and text datasets across more than 40 African languages, helping make critical agricultural information accessible to farmers in their own languages through regional networks including the Masakhane Research Foundation and Digital Umugunda.

These and many other partners are coming together to share learnings and accelerate progress via the AI Collaborative: Food Security – because no single organization can solve today’s biggest challenges alone. Together, the Gates Foundation and Google aim to make advanced AI a practical tool for the farmers most exposed to climate change, turning complex data and research into actionable insights, stronger harvests, and greater resilience. By supporting local institutions, infrastructure, and talent, the initiative seeks to build AI solutions that are not only accessible at scale, but designed and sustained by the communities they serve.