Microsoft Building Footprints is the broadest-coverage open building dataset available, spanning nearly every country with over 1.2 billion polygons derived from deep learning on Bing Maps aerial imagery. Where Google Open Buildings focuses on Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, Microsoft provides the only free AI-generated building footprints for North America, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania — making it the default choice when you need global or multi-regional building data under a single consistent methodology.
The data is geometry-only (outlines, confidence scores, and area), so it serves a different purpose than attribute-rich sources like OpenStreetMap: it tells you where buildings are and how large they are, not what they're used for.
The practical value of complete building coverage at this scale is that it turns buildings into an analytical layer rather than just a reference map. Aggregate footprints by grid cell and you get settlement density maps for population estimation. Compare footprints across time periods and you can track urban expansion. Overlay with flood zones, seismic hazard, or wildfire risk and you can estimate structural exposure.
For countries without cadastral records or comprehensive property databases, Microsoft footprints may be the only building-level spatial data available — which is why humanitarian organizations, development banks, and disaster response teams have adopted it for electrification planning, damage assessment, and infrastructure gap analysis. The data also feeds into the Overture Maps Foundation and pairs well with OpenStreetMap for attribute enrichment in regions where OSM has strong volunteer coverage.
