AI investment divergence posing challenges for least developed nations

What happened

Global investment in artificial intelligence and advanced technology is concentrating so heavily in a handful of sectors and economies that it risks leaving the world's least developed nations further behind, ministers and policymakers warned at the AIM Congress in Dubai on Tuesday. James X Zhan, executive chairman of the World Investment Conference and former chief adviser to the secretary general of UN Trade and Development, told a ministerial round-table that more than 40 per cent of global investment is now flowing into a narrow band of sectors, chiefly AI and the digital economy, while allocations to traditional manufacturing decline.

Mr Zhan added that even within advanced technology investment, developing countries receive only a fraction of what is channelled into developed economies. Speakers at the round-table called for investors and policymakers to coordinate more deliberately on how capital flows are directed, both across sectors and across geographies, to prevent the digital divide from widening further as AI adoption accelerates.

Why it matters

This is fundamentally a story about how unevenly the benefits of the AI build-out are being distributed, and what that means for the next phase of digital transformation globally. Where investment concentrates, infrastructure, talent and institutional capability follow — meaning countries left out of this cycle risk falling permanently behind on the digital and AI capability that increasingly underpins public services, commerce and economic competitiveness.

For governments and multilateral bodies in less-resourced markets, the signal is that waiting for capital to arrive organically is unlikely to work. For investors and technology providers operating across MENA and other emerging regions, the warning points to a growing responsibility — and opportunity — to structure financing and deployment models that extend AI capability beyond the markets that already have scale, data infrastructure and a deep investor base.

By the numbers

• More than 40 per cent of global investment is going into a narrow set of sectors, including AI and the digital economy, according to James X Zhan, executive chairman of the World Investment Conference.
• A declining share of global investment is going to traditional manufacturing, as capital shifts toward technology-led sectors.
• A fraction of advanced technology investment overall is reaching developing countries, compared with the share captured by developed economies.

The Renascence take

The headline risk here isn't that AI investment is concentrated — concentration is a normal feature of early technology cycles. The real risk is that the institutions meant to course-correct this, investors, multilateral bodies, national policymakers, are currently acting independently rather than in concert, which is precisely what allows imbalances to compound rather than self-correct.

Most coverage of the "digital divide" frames it as an access problem, solved by more funding. We'd frame it as a design problem: capital, like customer attention, flows toward the path of least friction, and today that path runs through markets that already have the data infrastructure, skilled talent and regulatory clarity to absorb AI investment quickly. If policymakers in less-resourced markets want a different outcome, the lever isn't appealing for a fairer share of existing flows — it's deliberately engineering lower-friction, de-risked entry points (sandboxes, blended finance, shared infrastructure) that make their markets the easier choice, not just the more deserving one.