From the Internet era to the AI era · 1990–2025

The next digital divide

In 2025, an estimated 74% of humanity was online. Microsoft estimates that only about one in six working-age people used generative AI. Explore the first race to connect the world, then switch to the new divide in who can use AI.

Built from the initial work in userman12/internet-adoption-map

The early Web
1990
0 countries ≥50%
Source: Our World in Data / ITU (2025)
Fixed borders · colour = adoption speed
drag to spin · Cmd/Ctrl + scroll to zoom
Data
Race
Overlay
Highlight
1990
2024
Context
Years from 10% → 50%
2 yr · fast17 yr · slow
Crossed 10%, still under 50%
No data / never 10%
Share of people online
0%100%
No data yet that year
100%

Online % Mobile /100 Broadband /100
The story beneath the map

How the world came online

Eleven chapters connect the changing map to infrastructure, wealth, mobile networks and the new AI divide.

Scroll sideways or use the arrows · open any chapter to see it on the map

The second digital divide

Being online is only the first gate

Each dot compares a country’s latest available Internet-use estimate, usually 2023 or 2024, with Microsoft’s estimated generative-AI diffusion in H2 2025. Different dates and methods mean this is a directional comparison, not a causal test.

16.3%world · H2 2025
24.7%Global North
14.1%Global South

Select a country to open it on the globe. AI diffusion is an adjusted Microsoft telemetry estimate for the working-age population, not a national survey.

Why the gap does not end with connectivity

Four foundations shape who can benefit

The World Bank’s 2025 framework separates the ingredients of meaningful AI participation. These are explanatory dimensions, not a single readiness score.

01

Connectivity

Affordable Internet access and reliable electricity remain the entry point.

02

Compute

Chips, cloud capacity and data centres are far more concentrated than Internet access.

03

Context

Models need local languages, data and applications that fit people’s actual needs.

04

Competency

Digital skills determine whether access becomes useful adoption.

How AI is used

Adoption is not one behaviour

Anthropic’s September 2025 Economic Index adds a different lens: within Claude conversations, coding remained the largest task category, while education and scientific use grew. This describes one product’s observed usage, not the share of a country using AI.

Read the Anthropic report ↗

Microsoft AI Diffusion Report ↗ · World Bank AI Foundations ↗

Data, not decoration

Where every layer comes from

The project combines statistical estimates, infrastructure records, proprietary telemetry and editorial context. They answer different questions and should not be interpreted as the same kind of evidence.

People using the internet

Our World in Data, based primarily on International Telecommunication Union estimates. Annual country series, 1990–2024. Used for the map, world total and 10%→50% calculations.

Processing: missing years between observations are linearly interpolated; the last observation is carried forward when a series ends early.

Open the OWID dataset ↗

The 2025 global connectivity headline

ITU Facts and Figures 2025 estimates that 6 billion people, 74% of humanity, were online in 2025 and 2.2 billion remained offline.

This updates the global story only. It is not used to paint a 2025 country map because complete, comparable 2025 country observations are not yet present in the project.

Open ITU Facts and Figures 2025 ↗

Generative-AI diffusion

Microsoft AI Economy Institute, H1 and H2 2025. The map includes 146 matched economies and shows the estimated share of the working-age population using generative AI.

Derived from aggregated, anonymised Microsoft telemetry and adjusted for device and operating-system share, Internet penetration and population. It is a modelled estimate, not a representative national survey. Growth is calculated here from the displayed rounded H1/H2 estimates.

Open the report and country table ↗

AI foundations

World Bank Digital Progress and Trends Report 2025. Its four-Cs framework explains AI participation through connectivity, compute, context and competency.

The framework combines indicators from different sources and years. This project uses it as an explanatory structure, not as a synthetic country score.

Open the World Bank report ↗

How Claude is used

Anthropic Economic Index, September 2025. A random sample of Claude.ai conversations is used to study task categories and patterns of collaboration or delegation.

This is one vendor and one product. Its relative usage index is not an adoption percentage and is kept separate from Microsoft’s diffusion estimates.

Open the Anthropic report ↗

Mobile and fixed broadband

World Bank Open Data: mobile subscriptions per 100 people (IT.CEL.SETS.P2) and fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 people (IT.NET.BBND.P2).

Subscriptions are not unique people. Values can exceed 100, and reporting coverage differs by country and year.

Mobile indicator ↗ · Broadband indicator ↗

Submarine cables

TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map data, accessed through a public mirror. The project contains 263 cable routes and their ready-for-service years.

This is a historical snapshot ending in 2015, not a current map of the cable network.

Open the source mirror ↗

Historical milestones

Manually curated editorial context, not a comprehensive dataset. Events are selected to explain changes in access, infrastructure, products, governance and disruption.

Selection is necessarily subjective and dates are shown at annual—not daily—resolution. Every milestone card links directly to its supporting primary or authoritative secondary source.

Country boundaries

world-atlas / Natural Earth geometry rendered with D3. Borders are fixed across the entire 1990–2024 animation.

They provide a consistent comparison frame and do not represent changing borders or political claims.

Open world-atlas ↗

Go further: measure the internet now

These resources answer questions this historical map cannot. Each measures a different part of access, performance or control; none is a complete view on its own.

Last data build: 2025 releases · Full processing notes and update commands are documented in SOURCES.md.