Re-Elected Lula Says Brazil Must Build Its Own AI Rather Than Depend on Chinese or American Models

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, re-elected on October 25 for a fourth term, has put home-grown artificial intelligence near the top of his agenda, CNN Brasil and Valor Econômico reported. Speaking to supporters on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo after the result, Lula said the country would teach more mathematics and engineering because he did not want Brazil to depend on Chinese or American AI, and wanted to create a Brazilian one instead.

His government programme for 2027 to 2030 sets out how. It promises to develop language models in Portuguese and other languages spoken in Brazil, supported by a national data platform for training and evaluating them. It also backs the expansion of data centres, but with mandatory social and environmental safeguards, energy efficiency targets, a gradual move to 100 per cent renewable power and assessments of the impact on the electricity grid, water supplies and local communities. Operators would also have to offer local content and computing capacity for the domestic market in return.

Much of this builds on the Brazilian Artificial Intelligence Plan, known as PBIA, which runs from 2024 to 2028 with a budget of R$23 billion. Celso Camilo, a professor at the Federal University of Goiás, told CNN Brasil the programme brings no new proposals compared with the existing plan, and that the challenge is speed. His summary: less planning and faster execution.

What it means in practice

Re-Elected Lula Says Brazil Must Build Its Own AI Rather Than Depend on Chinese or American Models — contextual photo

There are already Brazilian models to build on, such as when a UFG centre launched Lumi, a free Portuguese model companies can train on their own data. On infrastructure, the next government inherits the tax incentives Lula approved when he sanctioned Redata, a five-year tax break for data centres, which the new safeguards would sit alongside.

The programme also promises to regulate digital platforms, though without detail. The question was sharpened during the campaign, which saw clashes such as when the electoral court ordered an unlabelled AI video removed and gave Meta and X 24 hours to act. The ECA Digital child-protection law has been in force since March, while a bill on digital platforms still awaits action in the Chamber of Deputies.

What to watch next is whether the new term brings fresh funding or deadlines for a Brazilian model, how the data-centre safeguards are written into rules, and whether platform regulation returns to Congress early in 2027.