Photo: Meeting between Haddad and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, in the USA. (Diogo Zacarias/MF)

In May this year, Finance Minister Fernando Haddad made a trip to the USA, followed by an announcement that caught attention: the intention to attract R$ 2 trillion [€320 billion] in Big Tech investments to Brazil, through the construction of foreign multinational data centres on our territory. The idea, sold as technological advancement and potential development in the area, may actually signify an enormous setback to Brazilian sovereignty and environment, without significant returns in increased tax collection, jobs or even progress in Brazil’s position in the digital economy, its technological potential or its data policy, the latter being non-existent until now.

This intention, without any robust plan and strategic vision of the position that technology, especially that which deals with data, has and will have in the geopolitical, economic and even military dispute in the coming period, seems to relegate Brazil to maintaining its position as a profoundly dependent and underdeveloped country, on its knees to the interests of foreign billionaires. It is the re-edition of Brazil as the world’s “big farm”, where this time, the commodities will not be soya, iron ore or crude oil, but rather Brazilians’ data, our natural resources or our energy vectors.

It is important to describe the concepts of “data” and “data centres”: data is the basic unit of information, used for the functioning of machine learning and large language models. Data centres are large physical infrastructures, with hundreds or thousands of high-capacity computers, responsible for storing, processing and distributing data; therefore, they are indispensable for the functioning of the digital economy, these servers provide conditions for artificial intelligence systems and applications, social networks, streaming services and many others to function. For this, they demand not only high-speed connectivity, but high energy and water consumption to cool the processors.

Some data that help dimension the environmental impact:

– One of Amazon’s (AWS) complexes that brings together 55 data centres in Virginia [US state] (USA), consumes about 15 TWh per year – equivalent to the electricity needed to supply 1.4 million homes in the USA annually.

– According to data from the International Energy Agency [global intergovernmental organisation], in 2022, data centres’ electricity consumption in Ireland accounted for 18% of the total consumed in the entire country.

– The data centre that TikTok [Chinese-owned social media platform] intends to install in Caucaia, in Ceará [Brazilian state in the northeast], is expected to consume the same amount of energy as 2.2 million Brazilians per day.

In the gap of absent regulation, the city of Eldorado do Sul [Rio Grande do Sul state], recently devastated by floods, is preparing to build what they are calling a “data centre city”; the Scala AI City is expected to consume an amount of electricity greater than the generation capacity of the country’s 4^th largest hydroelectric plant, the Jirau plant [major dam in Rondônia state]. At its peak, the enterprise is projected to consume energy equivalent to that of 40 million people.

In water terms, on an optimistic average, a medium-sized data centre consumes 4.16 million litres of water per day for cooling, an amount equivalent to that of a city of about 26 thousand inhabitants.

In Brazil, the number of data centres grew 628% between 2013 and 2023, and the government’s projection, made by the Energy Research Company [EPE - state-owned company], is that in 2037 the energy consumption of these data centres will reach the equivalent of consumption by 25 million people. Disorderly growth, without any planning, regulation or established guidelines.

Is the plan of the governments in office for us to become a cyber colony?

The objective of this text is not to create an antagonism of combat against technological development, on the contrary. But it is urgent that we question: which interests will Brazilian technological development serve? Who are the agents indicated to perform the task of our development? Does calling for Big Tech to install data centres here result in any technological development? Is Brazil’s great objective in this chess game, faced with imminent climate collapse, to provide our resources so that Big Tech can increase their profits at the expense of the planet and our biomes [distinct biological communities]?

The planet is engulfed by wars, with an organised and thriving extreme right in various countries, the billionaire owners of these companies – who were, incidentally, in the front row of Donald Trump’s inauguration; from Jeff Bezos [Amazon founder] to Shou Zi Chew [TikTok CEO], from Sundar Pichai [Google CEO] to Sam Altman [OpenAI CEO] – have no convergent interest with the Brazilian people. Elon Musk [Tesla/X owner] turns his cannons against Brazil daily; Zuckerberg [Meta/Facebook CEO], in a statement at the beginning of the year, explicitly threatened our sovereignty when speaking about the possibility of regulating his company’s services in Brazil. This is not to mention the criminal lobby against PL 2630 [Brazilian bill to regulate social media platforms], which created a war arena in the National Congress [Brazilian parliament] against still timid, but imperative and urgent regulation of social networks.

Haddad did not specify where he got the supposed R$ 2 trillion [€320 billion] figure from, nor where the investment would be, but in a statement to the press, he revealed his main concern: “We contract 60% of our IT outside the country, which means not only remittance of dollars abroad, but underinvestment in Brazil and I believe that the launch of this policy (National Data Centre Plan) will make investment improve a lot.” An uninformed reader might infer, then, that the minister has, with the government, a plan for developing our technology, a new data policy... No! The announcement has to do with the government’s intention to send a project to the National Congress to exempt Big Tech from investments in information technology capital goods, for data centres. Yes, exemption so that foreign multinationals can continue storing and controlling our data – only now on national territory.

Proof of Big Tech’s insatiable and predatory greed came a few hours after the minister returned to Brazil. One of the main spokespeople for the data neocolonialism lobby, Mehdi Paryavi, representative of IDCA (International Data Centre Authority, an industry association which brings together representatives from Google, Amazon and Microsoft), declared to Folha de São Paulo [major Brazilian newspaper]:

“According to the executive, the country needs to build an image of digital power, promoting investment promotion policies, with a clear portfolio of available energy resources and guaranteeing a flexible and secure legal framework for digital business. The data centre sector has already criticised, for example, sections of the artificial intelligence regulation bill that determined remuneration for the use of data protected by copyright in the development of language models.”

In plain language: they want the exemptions, but also guarantees of Brazilian subordination for the exploitation of natural resources, without any regulatory counterpart for the use of Brazilians’ data for their business. They want the perfect scenario of profit maximisation for them, at our expense, leaving us with all sorts of undesirable by-products, whether in the material or digital dimension.

We are hostages of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and it seems there is no intention to reverse this situation. A recent example was the country’s most prestigious university, USP [University of São Paulo], which bet on an agreement with Google for email and cloud provider, and had the service abruptly discontinued, being subject to renewing a contract that will certainly have exorbitant values. Academic and management data from our main university, completely handed over to the governance and financial interests of a foreign multinational. And unfortunately USP is not an exception, the agreements extend to the overwhelming majority of our universities, public companies and governments at all levels.

The route traced so far by our country is contrary to building our digital sovereignty, and contrary to international trends established by countries that have already understood the importance of developing structures, scientific projects and policies that pave the way. Part of our tasks, incidentally, should be the search for cooperation in the Global South on the theme.

The mismatch between the economic policy applied by the government and the development of our digital sovereignty seems undeniable. This is because days before embarking on the trip where he met and promised tax benefits to figures like Ruth Porat, Google’s financial director, and Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, Minister Haddad, together with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, presented a decree contingenting R$ 2.5 billion [€400 million] from MEC [Ministry of Education], putting the full functioning of federal universities at risk. The measure was partially revoked, weeks later, due to pressure from university communities; but it remains as a constant threat, being a direct consequence of the so-called fiscal framework, also instituted by the government, which imposes a ceiling on investments in social areas, such as education, and science and technology.

We need to head towards breaking with technological dependence!

For this it is necessary to break with fiscalist logic, invest in education and science and technology, nationally regulate Big Tech’s activities in all their activities, establish layers of protection for Brazilians’ data, face these companies as the threat they are, and listen to specialists and movements in the area to build a Digital Sovereignty Development Plan and Data Policy with short, medium and long-term objectives.

Not for sovereignty circumscribed to the limits of the State or the strengthening of possible “national champions” from the private sector, but sovereignty led by our universities, laboratories and public companies, connected to our people’s needs, with socio-environmental responsibility and social and popular participation.

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Giovanny Ferreira is a communicator and member of the leadership of MES/PSOL [Socialist Left Movement/Socialism and Liberty Party] in São Paulo state.

This text is part of collective effort and elaborations of the “Digital Studies Group” promoted by MES [Socialist Left Movement] in São Paulo. Contributors include Professor Artur Marques (UERN) [State University of Rio Grande do Norte] and Davi Barbosa, from MES São Paulo branch.

References

– Greenpeace Finds Amazon Breaking Commitment to Power Cloud with 100% Renewable Energy

– IEA Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks

– Data center TikTok energia estudo interno

– Água para as bigtechs e estiagem para o povo: o que não dizem sobre o mega data center do TikTok no Ceará

– ’Cidade de data centers’ no RS pode gastar mais energia que 40 milhões de pessoas

– Data Center Water Complexity

– O lado obscuro da expansão de datacenters na América Latina

– Consumo de energia de data centers igualará o de 25 mi de pessoas

– Zuckerberg acenou ao trumpismo para defender o lucro bilionário das BigTechs

– Haddad viaja à Califórnia para buscar investimentos em data centers

– Após proposta de Haddad, data centers internacionais dizem que isenção de impostos não basta

– Google encerra armazenamento ilimitado, como previsto, e USP “lava as mãos”