Policy Brief No. 225 — February 2026
AI’s Global South Pivot: Equity, Ethics and Ecology Deepak Maheshwari
Key Points → Investment in core technologies and infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI) continue to be concentrated within the Global North, even as the Global South — home to 88 percent of humanity — remains more vulnerable to risks. → Structural exclusion perpetuates the Global South’s post-colonial dependency as “rule-takers” who provide training data, deployment sites, natural minerals and other critical elements for this transformative technology, albeit without adequate safeguards or commensurate social and economic gains. To remedy this “wicked problem,” AI governance frameworks must be predicated on the trinity of equity, ethics and ecological sustainability. → This policy brief identifies opportunities for inclusive, effective and proportionate participation by the Global South in AI governance, outlining the systemic and power dynamics at play, and offering actionable recommendations for the short, medium and long terms.
Introduction The impact of the 2022 launch of ChatGPT (OpenAI 2022), a generative AI tool,1 calls to mind that of Netscape Navigator’s debut in 1994. Both products democratized access to transformative technologies with seemingly magical capabilities. ChatGPT enabled natural language interactions, making it user-friendly for the average user, just as the Netscape browser had made the internet broadly accessible, and both were offered free of charge, at least initially. However, internet access had increased significantly across the Global South by the time ChatGPT was launched, whereas three decades earlier, when Netscape Navigator was released, internet services were mostly concentrated within the Global North.2 All the same, even in 2026, AI infrastructure, technologies and investment continue to be concentrated within the Global
1
IBM’s Deep Blue and Watson, followed by Google’s AlphaGo — debuting in 1995, 2004 and 2016, respectively — did generate excitement, but they did not lead to mass adoption.
2
Neither the Global South nor the Global North is a monolithic or homogeneous region. The constituents of the Global South are also sometimes referred to as low- and middle-income countries.