A senior United Nations technology official said on Sunday that artificial intelligence could widen the gap between rich and poor countries, warning that unequal access to the technology risks becoming an “opportunity divide.”

Tomas Lamanauskas, the deputy secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, the UN agency for information and communication technologies, spoke in an interview with Al Jazeera on the sidelines of the UNCTAD World Investment Forum in Doha, Qatar. Developing countries, he said, face steep barriers to sharing in what AI can do.

“I think the AI divide is really the big concern because it’s really not just about the digital divide,” Mr. Lamanauskas said. AI could improve health care, education, public services, industry, farming and trade, he said, so the countries without it would be cut off from far more than a new tool: “a great divide could really mean an opportunity divide, and really could deepen the socioeconomic divide.”

He started with hardware. Africa and Latin America together hold 3.3 percent of the world’s data center capacity, he said, and 2.2 billion people still have no internet access. Closing the gap in digital infrastructure would take about $2.8 trillion in investment by 2030.

“So you clearly see still a rather big infrastructure divide,” he said.

Use of the tools is uneven, too. About 29 percent of working-age people in developed countries use generative AI, compared with 16 percent in developing countries, according to figures Mr. Lamanauskas cited. “This actually affects your ability to be productive and to be part of job-market opportunities,” he said.

He cited estimates that AI could eliminate 90 million jobs while creating 170 million, and said the net gain wouldn’t spare individual workers from upheaval. Around 40 percent of workplace skills could shift by 2030, Al Jazeera reported, and only 7 percent of African languages appear in AI translation tools, a gap that bears on whether people can use public services or compete for work in their own language.

The warning isn’t new for the UN. A report from the UN Development Program in December 2025 said AI could open a new era of inequality between nations and reverse decades of progress, with countries short on reliable power, connectivity and skills most at risk. The 2026 International AI Safety Report, released in February, estimated that about one billion people use AI and that roughly 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies and 40 percent in emerging ones could be exposed to it.

“The fears are real,” Fazl Barez, a senior AI safety and governance researcher at the University of Oxford, told Al Jazeera. He drew a line between automating tasks and replacing whole jobs, and said routine cognitive work was the most exposed, though how far that would go was uncertain. “AI-driven automation threatens to erode government tax bases, lower living standards, and disempower citizens,” he said.

Mr. Lamanauskas, who was elected to the ITU’s No. 2 post for a term running from 2023 to 2026, has pressed the point for weeks. “The priority is to prevent the digital divide from becoming an AI divide,” he told the South Asian Herald in an interview published Oct. 8, adding that countries need the capacity to build local applications, not only access.

Governments have at least started planning. There are 104 countries with national AI strategies, up from four a decade ago, Al Jazeera reported.

Mr. Lamanauskas said he did not think the technology could be stopped, or controlled by any one person, organization or company. “AI is here to stay, and AI is here to transform our lives,” he said. He called for spending on infrastructure, education and regulation so developing countries could help shape AI rather than simply receive it.

“The way forward is really to invest to make sure that the AI benefits everyone,” he said.