By SERGIO AMADEU DA SILVEIRA*

Fernando Haddad wants to attract data centers, but he doesn’t question who will control our data. Without chips, its own infrastructure or alliances with the BRICS, Brazil deepens its dependence in the AI ​​era

1.

Few people still doubt the relevance of technology as a crucial element of political, military and economic power. Neoliberal economists perform their acrobatics on a tightrope to justify income concentration and the importance of stability in poverty, but they cannot hide the fact that technology policy is fundamental to a country's development. So, we must ask ourselves, what is our technology policy?

How is it integrated into economic policy in Brazil? It seems that we are continuing the path of development with dependence or subordinate development. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, what role do we want to play in the international division of labor and knowledge?

Data is the fundamental input for Artificial Intelligence, especially machine learning, deep learning and large language models such as GPT and DeepSeek. Data is constantly being collected by big techs. It is for this reason that the United States concentrates more than 50% of the data centers of the planet. Without sufficient data, training Artificial Intelligence models is not viable.

That's why the US concentrates data in hyperscale infrastructures. A single Google data center in The Dalles consumed 1,35 billion liters of water in 2020 to cool its more than 200 servers that store and process data.

The environmental impact of data centers is well-known and, according to the International Energy Agency, is already comparable to the annual consumption of a country like Japan. The connectionist Artificial Intelligence model, based on vast databases, must be questioned. Although big techs have social networks and applications that guarantee them an abundant creation and extraction of data from almost the entire planet, it is necessary to denounce their social and environmental unsustainability.

Some American big tech companies are considering using small nuclear reactors to ensure the high energy consumption of their data centers. They call it clean energy, forgetting about nuclear waste and the serious risks that this option will bring.

A few months ago, the Chinese Communist Party declared that data is a factor of production. In a way, it is assumed that data has become capital. With it, we feed Artificial Intelligence and create new products and services. Companies like Apple, Tesla and Microsoft are forced to store Chinese user data on servers inside China, operated by joint ventures or local partners.

India and Indonesia have highly restrictive policies on extracting data from their country. Brazil does not. Here we allow even public sector data to be stored in the United States.

2.

I recently read that Finance Minister Fernando Haddad wants to attract big tech data centers to Brazil. Are we finally accepting the importance of technology in economic policy? Are we following China's path in relation to data? Will the data centers that the minister intends to bring have national capital and shared governance? Everything indicates that they will not.

The article said that the Ministry of Finance intends to make demands such as “10% of the capacity of the data centers contemplated must be offered exclusively in the domestic market, whether for companies, research projects or universities and public policies” (the article from the portal UOL reported). That's great, this way Amazon will be able to attract data from the few universities that have not yet handed over their databases to Google and Microsoft.

There does not appear to be a plan to build basic AI infrastructure beyond the package of goodies for big techs. There are no policies to prevent certain data from being extracted and hosted outside the country, such as in India, Indonesia and China. Data repositories, discussion lists, and the digital mailboxes of more than 70% of Brazilian universities are hosted by big techs. We do not have policies to reverse this. We do not encourage public-private arrangements of national capital for the construction of data centers.

We are still living in a development policy based on deepening dependence. This seems to be the only way forward. Furthermore, we run the risk of the tiny compensations being rejected by Congress, which is dominated by the Centrão. It is worth remembering that big techs have blocked the regulation of platforms and are aligned with Donald Trump's administration in this regard.

The Ministry of Finance is following a path similar to the old formula for attracting car manufacturers. Is this the right path? Let's focus on attracting big tech companies at a time when countries are concentrating their efforts on internalizing strategic parts of the development of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence.

What is our policy for chips and high-performance boards, which are essential for training models and performing Artificial Intelligence inference tasks? The development model that attracts companies that extract data from our population, concentrate processing structures and send the profits from this operation to their headquarters was named digital colonialism by South African researcher Michael Kwet.

In addition to all this, the proposal to strengthen big tech data centers, instead of creating other arrangements – such as with the BRICS countries – disregards the geopolitical scenario and the security issue in a situation shaken by Donald Trump. Is the Brazilian government unaware of the CloudAct?

3.

This law, passed by the US in 2018, establishes that US companies must provide data under their possession, custody or control, even if that data is stored outside the United States. Along with CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) And Patriot Act, the United States practices extraterritorial jurisdiction. In other words, US companies (such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, etc.) must comply with US court orders regardless of where the data is physically stored. Have we forgotten what Edward Snowden showed us in 2013?

The fact is that the legal apparatus and technical devices used by US security and intelligence agencies ensure that big tech companies provide data stored on servers abroad. Furthermore, these companies have the power to block, remove or transfer data even on servers located in other countries, depending on the court decision.

This alone would be enough to consider it inappropriate and dangerous for the Brazilian government to host data from its ministries and companies in the clouds of big techs, even if their structures are physically located in the country. Faced with pressure from several countries, mainly the European Union, big techs launched a product to continue extracting and controlling data from techno-dependent countries called “Sovereign Cloud”. A commercial euphemism.

This proposal by Minister Fernando Haddad allows us to discuss the lack of a plan that incorporates technology into the center of the government's economic policy decisions. However, it is important to note that we can seek sovereignty, autonomy and national governance of technologies. We have the possibility of building strategic alliances, especially with the BRICS. However, without a national technological plan, we will not overcome our condition of acute technological dependence.

*Sergio Amadeu da Silveira is a professor at the Federal University of ABC. Author, among other books, of Data colonialism: how the algorithmic trench operates in the neoliberal war (Literary Autonomy). [https://amzn.to/3ZZjDfb]

Originally published on the website Other words.

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