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The Gates Foundation announced an initiative in partnership with OpenAI to support healthcare systems in Africa, beginning in Rwanda, that includes $50 million in funding, technical support and technology to help include AI in their healthcare systems.
The Foundation said the pilot initiative, Horizon 1000, will bring AI to communities to help address the shortage of healthcare workers prevalent throughout the region.
The initiative will start in Rwanda but over time aims to reach 1,000 clinics in Africa and their surrounding communities by 2028.
In a video, Bill Gates, chair and board member of The Gates Foundation, said AI will help clinicians make faster decisions, reduce the amount of paperwork and suggest things to the clinician that they might want to consider.
Gates said in a statement that the goal is to expand AI adoption throughout the healthcare systems and in individuals' homes, and the tools are meant to support healthcare workers, not replace them.
"I believe this partnership with OpenAI, governments, innovators and health workers in sub-Saharan Africa is a step towards the type of AI we need more of: systems that help people all over the world to solve generational challenges that they simply didn't know how to address before," Gates said in a statement.
"I invite others working on AI to think about how we can put these massively powerful tools to the best use."
THE LARGER TREND
Gates, who cofounded Microsoft, owned the vast majority of the tech giant through The Gates Foundation Trust.
In Q3 2025, The Gates Foundation Trust sold roughly 17 million of its shares in Microsoft, in order to use the funds to support its global health and development work.
Microsoft and OpenAI have had a strategic partnership for years, with Microsoft being a significant investor in the company beginning in 2019, providing a $1 billion investment and an announcement that Azure would be the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI.
In 2023, Microsoft committed another investment of approximately $10 billion and announced that GPT-4 would power new features in Microsoft's Bing Chat.
In January 2025, Microsoft released a statement announcing the continuation of their strategic partnership and their alliance to partner on Stargate.
Microsoft noted in a statement that the key aspects of its partnership with OpenAI remains in place for the duration of the companies' contract through 2030, which includes access to OpenAI's IP, its revenue-sharing arrangements and Microsoft's exclusivity on OpenAI’s APIs.
In October, Microsoft announced that it signed a new definitive agreement with Open AI, noting that the tech giant supports the OpenAI board moving forward with the formation of a public benefit corporation (PBC) and recapitalization.
"Following the recapitalization, Microsoft holds an investment in OpenAI Group PBC valued at approximately $135 billion, representing roughly 27 percent on an as-converted diluted basis, inclusive of all owners – employees, investors and the OpenAI Foundation. Excluding the impact of OpenAI's recent funding rounds, Microsoft held a 32.5 percent stake on an as-converted basis in the OpenAI for-profit," Microsoft said in a statement.
"OpenAI remains Microsoft's frontier model partner, and Microsoft continues to have exclusive IP rights and Azure API exclusivity until Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)."
The agreement also requires any OpenAI declaration of AGI to be verified by an independent expert panel, extends Microsoft's IP rights through 2032 to include post-AGI systems with safety guardrails, and maintains Microsoft's research IP rights until AGI is verified or 2030, with specific preclusions.
Additionally, OpenAI can co-develop products with third parties (with API products exclusive to Azure), serve non-API products on any cloud, release qualifying open-weight models and provide APIs to U.S. national security customers on any cloud.
The contract also states that Microsoft can independently pursue AGI, remains subject to large compute thresholds if using OpenAI IP pre-AGI, and continues revenue-sharing until AGI verification with extended payments.
The contract also commits OpenAI to $250 billion in additional Azure services and removed Microsoft's right of first refusal on OpenAI's compute.
