What If Part of the $500 Billion AI Allocation Was Focused On Women’s Health?

In January 2025, President Donald Trump announced the Stargate Initiative, a $500 billion private sector initiative to expand U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure. This is a bold, moonshot initiative with little direction or focus on individual sectors.  But it’s a start.  

What if just 10% of the $500 billion was allocated to women’s health?  

According to the NIH, women’s health is a broad category that includes health issues that are unique to women, such as menstruation and pregnancy, as well as conditions that affect both men and women, but that may affect women differently, such as heart disease and diabetes.

As 51% of the population, women hold significant value in all sectors of the economy including consumer, industrial, and political. And now with the significant reductions of government funding to the already limited women’s health funding, women’s health stands to retreat to the 1950’s without alternate investment.  

Thankfully there are two advantages women today have over 70 years ago. First, the consumer power and vast knowledge base women demand from all industries is expansive and continues to demand information and women understand their purchasing power. Secondly, the technology of AI has the ability to technologically power faster, easier, and more inventive research and innovation for all people, including women.  

So with $500 billion allocated to the Stargate initiative (which many assume will drive another $500 billion in private funding totaling at least a $1 trillion investment in AI in the US), just imagine what could be done with 10% of that focused on 51% of the population. That equates to just $295 per woman in the United States (for the initial $500 billion investment).

What could be done with $50 billion serving over half of the population of this country?  Just imagine if we had:

• Vaccines for cancers: Specifically for women this includes breast, ovarian, and endometrial cancers.
  • This would follow the success of the HPV vaccine which is eliminating cervical cancer and eradicating an entire disease. In 2035, Australia will be the first country to eradicate cervical cancer by a combination of HPV vaccinations and screen/treat protocols.  
• Consolidated AI imaging techniques to scan for cancers, heart disease, and kidney disease by just standing in front of a mirror or an annualized body scan.
  • This has been trialed and is in initial stages with high-cost body scans (such as Prenuvo), but due to the siloed nature of private sector innovation, this is not a reality.
• Predictive analytics from blood tests, imaging scans, and genomics reports to predict future looking health problems so that they can be treated before they begin and/or at stage 0 of disease. This is the future of precision medicine and precision healthcare.
  • Healthcare is becoming more personalized, but so far, there is no consolidated manner nor analytic tool to predict future health outcomes.  This technology could enable early prevention or mitigation for many women’s (and men’s) health conditions.  Precision and targeted healthcare and/or medicine most applicable for the individual can be directed as a result of the analytics.
• Research, using AI models and large complex data sets, into how women differ for all available therapeutics, biologics, and pharmaceuticals currently on the market (which are traditionally tested on men).
  • Women were not allowed to be in clinical trials until 1993 and today only make up approximately 41% of participants in clinical studies.
• Using the above research and datasets, analysis on how women present differently for the top 25 diseases. Women’s presentation of most diseases drastically differs from how men present for many of the same diseases.
  • Women do not clutch their chest when having a heart attack, they have back and stomach pain which causes longer diagnosis time for women which directly correlates to increased mortality. This is especially pressing, as women are twice as likely to die from cardiac disease than men.
• Healthy eating, a large platform of the new administration’s Secretary of the US Health and Human Services department, RKF Jr, is healthy eating. Using AI models to understand how the chemicals and additives in today’s food sources are affecting children, especially young women, throughout their lifetime is preventive healthcare. Health disparities disproportionately affect women and girls as many additives disrupt natural hormone and fertility cycles.
• Health equity among all women with all the above technologies. Where a woman lives should not dictate the care she received, nor should her insurance coverage capabilities. Utilizing the technologies for screening, treatment and prevention distributing healthcare should not be a privilege, it should be a right. 

As women are 51% of the population, in theory, we should have 51% of the $500 billion allocated to us. But in reality, we would be happy with just 10% for further investment into women’s health, more than has ever been focused on us in the last 100 years.

Photo: asnidamarwani, Getty Images

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