Brazil Delays Its Nearly R$1 Billion AI Supercomputer Tender Until After the Runoff
The selection of a supplier for the artificial intelligence supercomputer in the Brazilian AI Plan (PBIA) has been pushed back from Thursday, October 8, to November 4, Convergência Digital reported, citing the website of the Foundation for Support of Scientific Computing Development (FACC). The 27-day delay moves the R$959 million contest past the presidential runoff on October 25, when voters choose between another term for Lula and a government led by Flávio Bolsonaro.
According to the documents, the delay follows substantial changes to the tender. An erratum keeps 70% of the score for the technical evaluation but cuts the weight of price from 30% to 10% and creates a new 20% share for national production, proven through the Basic Productive Process (PPB) for very high-capacity servers. It also adjusts the performance tests, adds agentic AI as a criterion and gives the winner more time to provide computing capacity before the final installation. Payment is set in three equal instalments of roughly R$319.7 million.
Public Selection No. 27/2026 is run by FACC on behalf of the National Scientific Computing Laboratory (LNCC), with money from Finep. Although LNCC is based in Petrópolis, the machine is to be installed at the Augusto Severo Science and Technology Park in Macaíba, Rio Grande do Norte. The winner must supply AI accelerators, storage, networking, software, installation and five years of support, and contribute to a national AI software stack. Consortia are barred.
What it means in practice
The specification leans heavily on sovereignty. It calls for perpetual licences for essential software, export of models in open formats, control over remote updates, a ban on unauthorised data transfers to outside servers, operation without external connectivity and mandatory confidential computing. The supplier must also be able to train at least 1,000 Brazilian specialists in three years and offer 1,200 hours a year of mentoring by senior researchers. IT equipment is capped at 3 megawatts, with at least 50 petabytes of shared storage.
The machine is the centrepiece of LNCC’s billion-real supercomputer plan in Macaíba, and it would give Brazilian researchers more room to train models such as the open Portuguese-language model Manacá-1B. Convergência Digital noted that some points in the documents remain inconsistent, including how the PPB proof becomes a score and a performance guarantee set at 10% in one document and 5% in another.
What to watch: whether the November 4 date holds after the runoff, whether FACC publishes a consolidated set of rules, and how many bidders can meet the single-supplier, no-consortium requirement.