Brazil's Plano Brasileiro de Inteligência Artificial commits R$23 billion (roughly $4B) over 2024-2028 across compute, public-sector deployment, sovereign data centres and Portuguese-language model work — making the country LATAM's largest sovereign AI bet despite a thin domestic founder cohort centered on São Paulo. NeuronFeed tracks 1 Brazilian AI startup, São Paulo-based Fini, while most Brazilian AI sits embedded inside Itaú's R$1B+ AI program, Santander Brasil, Bradesco, and the agritech vertical anchored by JBS, Cargill Brasil, and Solinftec.
Roughly R$14B of the PBIA mandate is allocated to business projects, with dedicated funding for the Petrobras-backed Portuguese foundation-model work and SENAI sovereign compute. Senate-approved PL 2338/2023 establishes EU-style AI Act risk tiers under ANPD enforcement, giving enterprise buyers compliance certainty heading into 2026. Kaszek (now $2B AUM), Monashees, Maya Capital, Canary, ONEVC, and Astella lead local seed rounds alongside Itaú, Bradesco, Vale, and B3 corporate venture arms; Tiger Global, SoftBank's $5B Latin America Fund, Sequoia, and a16z run their LATAM books out of São Paulo. Brazilian founders routinely redomicile to Delaware or Cayman before Series A, depressing the HQ count even as the Banco Central regulatory sandbox expands AI-credit pilots into a 217M-person retail banking market through 2027.