Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella announced on Tuesday that the company would donate $1 billion worth of its cloud to nonprofits, universities, and other organizations dedicated to improving human lives and preventing "another digital divide."

Much good will undoubtedly sprout from the tools Microsoft is giving away, but the company will also clearly benefit in the ongoing war of the clouds.

Microsoft will donate $1 billion in Microsoft Cloud Services to "serve the public good," as the company's blog put it on Tuesday. Over the next three years, the billion-dollar charitable initiative will provide cloud services to 70,000 non-profit organizations and NGOs across the globe.

The initiative will be carried out by the recently formed Microsoft Philanthropies organization, which will allocate the company's cloud computing resources and tools to the organizations to the tune of a billion dollars -- "measured at fair market value," of course.

Specifically, the 70,000 organizations will be given access to the company's services and products including Microsoft Azure, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Online, Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, and its data analytics visualization tool, Power BI.

Preventing a New Global Digital Divide

As Nadella said in an op-ed published in the Financial Times the morning after the announcement, Microsoft's move was motivated by a concern about a possible world where "only wealthy societies have access to the data, intelligence, analytics and insights that come from the power of mobile and cloud computing," resulting in a new "digital divide."

Nadella notes that cloud computing is a powerful resource for innovation, understanding, and predictive analysis of large quantities of data -- more and more so in the increasingly device and sensor-laden, connected world.

"In September last year," Nadella wrote, giving an example of the importance of cloud computing, "the UN adopted 17 sustainable development goals to tackle some of the toughest global problems by 2030, including poverty, hunger, health and education. Data and cloud computing will play a central role in realizing those goals."

To carry out the huge philanthropic effort, the company will take a three-pronged approach. First, distribution: Microsoft will start rolling out its free cloud services and products to organizations beginning this spring. Next, the company will expand its Azure for Research program for universities -- which includes free Azure cloud storage and other resources -- by 50 percent.

Finally, Microsoft Philanthropies and the company's Business Development arm will work together with private-public partnerships to build out so-called "last mile" connections to communities without access, supplementing hardware with community training for when the cloud arrives. Microsoft says it intends to support 20 build-outs in at least 15 countries around the world by mid-2017.

Market Share and Regulatory Sway for Microsoft

For all of its incredible world-shaping potential, Microsoft's $1 billion cloud donation and the initiatives that come with it might strike the more cynically minded as oddly familiar. The announcement recalls Facebook's controversial altruistic project Internet.org, which some took to be self-serving.

Indeed, as the killjoys at Fortune pointed out, "Public-mindedness aside, part of this is probably about getting more people using Microsoft's systems as opposed to those of its rivals."

In other words, the company is stuck in second place to Amazon Web Services. Amazon got there first, currently dominates the market, has more capacity than the next 14 largest rivals combined, yet is still scaling much faster than Microsoft's best offering.

What does Microsoft do in this situation? It gives its cloud away for free, of course. And it makes sure its cloud is the first to arrive in untapped territories, teaching those communities how to use its particular software ecosystem.

"It's not surprising to see Microsoft doing that given that competitors such as Google have been very active in the nonprofit and education sector for some time and their often free services challenge Microsoft," IDC researcher George Mironescu told Fortune. "With this move, it's a way for Microsoft to be re-discovered by entities in these sectors and to get such organizations to test its public cloud capabilities."

With massive adoption and expansion through its philanthropy, Microsoft reaps another benefit, one that Nadella's (no doubt, genuine) altruism hardly cloaked in his FT piece: a larger say in the shape of regulation, negotiations, and governance surrounding the flow of data across boarders, and around the world.

Indeed, after his first four paragraphs announcing the donation, Nadella got right down to laying out elements of "a coherent policy framework with cloud computing at its heart," as he put it.

He suggests some great things: government infrastructure investments in low-cost broadband in remote areas, investment in global STEM education, and making public data transparent and available, through the cloud of course. He also called for a balance of regulation "that protects both security and privacy while enabling data to flow freely across boarders," with an emphasis on freedom of expression and the individual's right to privacy.

Along the way, Nadella also included a specific dig against the E.U. Court of Justice's recent decision invalidating Europe's "Safe Harbor" pact with the U.S., which has been used by Silicon Valley to transfer Europeans' personal data to American shores and skirt E.U. data privacy laws.

Another classic case of Sillicon Valley "philanthrocapitalism"? There are certainly some conceivable win-win scenarios in this for Microsoft. But hold off disillusionment for now and see what happens.

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