How We're Investigating Brazil’s Data Center Development Boom

Data centers are a critical part of artificial intelligence. These gigantic warehouses, oftentimes the size of football fields, house powerful computers equipped with chips that process, distribute, and train data. One could say that data centers are the physical part of the “cloud.” With the popularization of AI, technology companies’ demands for data centers designed specifically for AI training have grown. These are bigger and more resource-intensive data centers than others designed for cloud services, for example. They are popularly known as hyperscalers.

Globally, companies are looking to develop and build data centers to meet this demand. These infrastructures have a big energy footprint and are water intensive, given the need to cool down the servers inside the warehouses. This means that regions that have availability of water and energy are becoming coveted by developers as ideal destinations to build data centers. 

The artificial intelligence supply chain is, as a whole, shrouded in secrecy. Opacity is a core element in how companies involved in the AI supply chain work. The same goes for data centers.

---

As a nonprofit journalism organization, we depend on your support to fund more than 170 reporting projects every year on critical global and local issues. Donate any amount today to become a Pulitzer Center Champion and receive exclusive benefits!

---

Developers are interested in having the least amount of information publicized before construction begins. This is why communities that receive these projects often only learn about them months before they are set to start operating, leaving them without crucial information, such as water and energy consumption, needed for them to evaluate how these projects will impact them and their communities and to mobilize against the project if they wish to. 

Over the past few months, we published our series A boiada da IA (The AI Herd) at the Intercept Brasil. In Portuguese, the name is a wordplay with the Brazilian word boiada, which translates to “a herd of bulls.” But the term boiada gained a new connotation during the Jair Bolsonaro administration when the former environmental minister suggested "passing the boiada" as a way to bypass environmental regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic, while all eyes were turned to the health emergency.

Our project The AI Herd looks at two levels: the macro and the local. Before diving into the local level, we needed to explain to our audiences how data centers popping up in random cities around Brazil are part of a bigger plan, one that goes even beyond Brazil. We also needed to familiarize our audience with what data centers are, what their potential impacts are, and why they are suddenly coming to Brazil.

We knew the federal government was working on a national policy to attract data center investment to Brazil. This was being led by the Ministry of Economy, with the participation of some other ministries. I was particularly interested in seeing whether this national policy had any environmental component.

In 2023, the Development, Industry and Commerce Ministry published a document suggesting "debureaucratizing" investments by waiving environmental permits. The study argued that data centers are low-impact projects and, therefore, don't require licensing.

I sent formal press requests to the government, to multiple ministries, asking about this "suggestion." I received no replies. We then changed strategies and looked for information on meetings held by government officials about the data center policy. This information is public in Brazil and made available on government websites.

This is how we were able to find out that the Environmental Ministry had been completely sidelined in the discussions to develop this national data center policy. Out of more than 80 meetings with 200 civil servants, the Environmental Ministry had not been present in one. We then confirmed this via a formal press request. 

This was an important absence because the Environmental Ministry is responsible for providing guidelines for the environmental permitting processes of data centers done at the state level.

Another important component of the policy was the promise to unlock trillions of reais in investments. Although the policy had not yet been published nor disclosed to Congress, government officials were giving interviews in which they stated the policy had the potential to unlock R$ 2 trillion in investments over the course of 10 years.

That is a very high number—in practical terms, it would require the announcement of four to five large-scale data center projects, with hundreds of megawatts in capacity, every year. We wanted to know how the government reached this number.

I exhaustively asked the ministries involved, but they kept telling us that "the policy was still being discussed" and they had nothing ready to show us. However, at the same time, the Ministry of Economy traveled to California and met with company executives to present the plan.

The lack of answers was, in itself, a story. We published a piece highlighting how the government had been using this big number to justify its policy, but it had failed to show how it reached the number and, more importantly, what Brazil had to gain from it. By then, based on interviews and media reports, it had become clear that, at the center of the policy, were tax breaks and exemptions to make Brazil attractive for developers.

National policy, local impact

On the local level, our first task was figuring out which projects were coming, where they were heading, and their current phase of installation. We had some leads already based on basic stories that were coming out in the press and conversations I had with data center executives. This is a good tip: Because the sector is so competitive right now, companies are eager to spill out information about competitors. Our job is to verify and check this information, but some of it was confirmed.

We knew that at least four different ministries at the federal level were working on data center policy and approving data centers. We placed several requests under the Brazilian Law to Access Information, asking for a list of data center projects that were under analysis by the government. A useful tip is to map out who are the relevant government bodies involved and to tailor the requests to each of them based on their expertise and potential involvement, instead of placing one same request to all. 

We had success with one ministry: Energy and Mines. It provided us with a list of all companies that had requested access to the basic energy grid to install data centers. This ended up being a great get, since this is the first bureaucratic hurdle companies have to clear at the federal level. Without energy, data centers don't exist.

With this list, we were able to publish a story about at least five projects planned in towns that were already suffering from drought. My colleague Francisco Amorim crossed the list we obtained from the Energy Ministry with a public database that contains data on emergencies decried by municipalities due to drought or prolonged dry spells.

One of these towns was Eldorado do Sul, in the south of Brazil. Initially, it was surprising to see Eldorado in the list of towns suffering from drought because in 2024, it was underwater. Eldorado do Sul was the town worst impacted during the May 2024 floods in Rio Grande do Sul. Over 80% of the town was underwater and damage is still visible to this day. But still it was chosen as a data center location.

This story gives the title to our Pulitzer Center project From Destruction to Speculation. In May 2025, we traveled to Eldorado do Sul. Our main goal was to understand how the population was perceiving this project. We were surprised when we arrived to learn that many people did not know that a data center was coming to town. But mostly, this was not the main concern for people there. Their priority was repairing their homes, preventing future floods, and hoping the municipality would implement solutions to prevent future floods and damage.

More concerning was that the Guarani-Mbyá Indigenous peoples, who are the most immediate neighbors of the data center, had not had their right to consultation and consent respected, a violation to Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization.

For this story, we tried to interview the mayor and some state government officials. None of them wanted to speak to us. They also said they did not have information to share at the time, although the government had already signed an intention protocol with the company.

One way we were able to confirm the exact location of the project was by going to the notary office of Eldorado do Sul and paying for a copy of the property registration. With this in hand, we were able to confirm the location, the dimensions of the land and the price paid by the data center developer.

Another of these towns set to receive a project was Caucaia, in Ceará, in the northeast of Brazil. Officially this project is under the name of Casa dos Ventos, a wind power company from the northeast. But given the dimensions of the data center and the fact that Casa dos Ventos is not a data center developer, we suspected someone else would take over the project once it was complete. This is a common tactic used by technology companies: They use developers or shell companies to avoid linking their names to potentially controversial projects. 

However, our experience has shown that, when we are able to explicitly tell our readers that a tech company known to them is connected to a data center project, they become more engaged with the story.

This is where another journalistic technique comes in: Have your sources. From more than two sources at the federal level that were involved in the national policy discussion, we knew that TikTok and ByteDance were connected to this project. This was further corroborated by, once again, meetings between civil servants, authorities, and TikTok employees.

We were able to find at least five meetings between high-level authorities, like ministers, and TikTok employees whose roles included 'data center development' or 'infrastructure lead'. All of these meetings had the participation of the governor of Ceará. A few days before we published our story, Reuters ran a story corroborating our findings that Bytedance was considering a stake in a data center in Ceará. 

Another helpful tip is that, from the very start of the reporting process, we engaged with national and local civil society and grassroots organizations. We used them as expert sources in our reporting, consulted with them about contextual information and kept them updated about any repercussions. This helped us build a connection based on trust. Thanks to one of these connections, we were able to obtain a document that was presented by the wind power company to obtain its environmental permit.

This document contains very crucial information that companies want to hide, such as the estimated energy and water consumption and information on how the project is being licensed. With this document, we were able to publish two new stories. One highlighted the intense energetic footprint of the project based on comparisons between the daily energy use and the broader energy consumption of the population. We were able to show how, in one single day, the data center is set to use what 2.2 million Brazilians use.

In a second story based on the document, we showed how the data center was licensed under a generic "civil construction" permit due to the lack of specific permitting rules for data centers. This, in turn, has led to reduced environmental controls on the licensing process and the full environmental impact not being adequately assessed.

Our series is still ongoing and we hope to publish more investigations about these data centers and new projects in progress. For us, this process has also been a learning experience.

Some key takeaways:

• Community engagement benefits our journalism in more than one way: It has ensured our reporting is reaching the communities on the frontline of data center development in Brazil, kept us grounded in producing journalism based on what they want and need to know, and helped us access material that would've otherwise remained inaccessible. 
• Speak to sources you think might not want to speak to you: I wasn't expecting to get data center executives on the phone, but they said yes!
• Sometimes, not getting an answer is a story in itself.
• If you are not getting information through official channels, be creative: We used the notary office to get around the lack of transparency.
• Keep an eye on who is meeting whom and how often.