Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella is in a somewhat generous mood, and has decided to donate his company’s expertise in cloud computing to the “public good” by giving away $1 billion worth of cloud services to nonprofits over the next three years.

Altogether, Microsoft wants to support around 70,000 nonprofit organizations using its cloud product, including Azure, CRM online, PowerBI and Office 365.

“Microsoft is empowering mission-driven organizations around the planet with a donation of cloud computing services — the most transformative technologies of our generation,” Nadella in his announcement. “Now more than 70,000 organizations will have access to technology that will help them solve our greatest societal challenges and ultimately improve the human condition and drive new growth equally.”

But the generosity doesn’t stop there, for Microsoft is also planning to expand the number of grants it gives to university researchers for free access to Azure’s compute and storage resources. Microsoft currently subsidizes around 600 ongoing research programs by letting them use Azure for free, and now the company wants to expand this number by fifty percent.

And as if that wasn’t enough philanthropy for one day, Nadella announced that his company would be making new investments in “new, low-cost last-mile Internet access technologies and community training”. What this means is that Microsoft will step up support for projects such as the plan to utilize TV white space to create more Internet access in Africa. Microsoft wants to fund around twenty similar products across 15 countries by the end of next year.

As to why Microsoft is doing this, the company’s president and chief legal officer Brad Smith explained that “cloud computing has emerged as a vital resource for addressing the world’s problems” and as such, Microsoft believes it “is vital that the cloud serve the public good in the broadest sense.”

Microsoft may well have good intentions, but one can’t help thinking it’s also making a strategic investment here. Many times, companies give away freebies with the intention of signing up users as customers later, and one can’t help think that’s what will happen here. After all, once all of those university researchers have graduated and the Africans have got online, many are going to want to continue using cloud and Internet services, and it makes sense that many will stick with the platform they already know.

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