$400 million AI bet before 2045: What Bill Gates Foundation plans to change for millions of Americans

Recently, the Bill Gates Foundation announced a $1 billion commitment to build and deliver equitable AI tools to schools, frontline health care workers, farmers worldwide. Out of the $1 billion, 40% will go toward education, including AI tutoring to individualize learning in classrooms both in the U.S. and abroad. This means a lumpsum amount $400 million will be infused into schools and is seen as an AI push is part of a broader U.S. education strategy the foundation laid out in July. The aim is to help up to 10 million more Americans earn “credentials of value” by 2045, the year the foundation plans to close before the organization ends its operations in 2045.

In May 2025, Bill Gates announced that the Bill Gates foundation would close its doors permanently on December 31, 2045, and that in the interim he would dedicate virtually all of his remaining personal wealth to fund foundation efforts to save and improve lives. The endowment funds, including Bill’s additional contributions between now and the foundation closure date, is estimated to be spent by the end of 2045, roughly.

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"I will give away virtually all my wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world. And on December 31, 2045, the foundation will close its doors permanently," Bill Gates wrote.

The donation comes at a time when value of classroom technology is being questioned with test scores among students dropping. Research has shown that after the United States spent about $30 billion on laptops for students, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath raised concerns that Gen Z may have weaker cognitive skills than previous generations. In a written testimony to a US Senate committee earlier this year, he wrote, "Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them."

On September 2, New York Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar H. Samuels today announced a moratorium on student-facing generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) use in schools, alongside a new screen time policy, a decision that will impact nearly 600,000 public school students, or two-thirds of the system’s total enrollment. The policy establishes a one-year moratorium, effective in the 2026-2027 school year, on student-facing generative AI for children in 2-K through 8th grade. It also introduces twice-yearly AI critical thinking modules for high schoolers, limited AI pilots for a small number of high school classrooms and age-appropriate screen time restrictions.

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A Gates Foundation spokesperson told Fortune that the tools will first be tested in schools with many low-income students. Teachers will also receive training, and independent researchers will evaluate the tools before they are used more widely. The foundation’s strategy also says that too many education tools have been introduced without enough evidence that they work, stressing that teachers should remain central to education.

What Bill Gates said on the donation

“The Gates Foundation was created in part to address a basic market failure: the people with the greatest needs often have the least power to shape where innovation and investment go,” Bill Gates, chair of the Gates Foundation, wrote in the report. “Much of our work has been about closing that gap. AI presents the same challenge, only at much greater speed. Left to the market alone, the most capable tools will be built first for the people and institutions most able to pay for them—not necessarily for those who could benefit most.” Gates adds, “We can harness AI for good. But it won’t happen by accident.”

He further writes, “[I]t requires a deliberate, specific commitment from government leaders and the companies developing the technology: to measure success not only by what AI can do for the most profitable users but by what it can do for the people who stand the most to gain.”