Brazil's Minister of Management and Innovation, Esther Dweck, laid out the core of the Lula administration's digital sovereignty plan in an interview with A Máquina, a podcast series from the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo running during the election season. The goal, she said, is to cut the risk of Brazil being locked out of essential technologies because of US sanctions and to give the country more autonomy to develop and regulate its own artificial intelligence.

"It is important to say that this is not self-sufficiency, and that Brazil will not close itself off from the world and manage to produce everything internally," Dweck told Folha. She broke the strategy into four layers: data sovereignty (knowing where data is and being able to reach it), operational capacity (keeping foreign-built systems running even if sanctions bar the provider from serving Brazil), homegrown technology development, and governance and regulation, meaning keeping digital services under Brazilian law rather than another country's jurisdiction. Think of digital sovereignty as a home generator: you do not need to own the power plant, but you need the lights to stay on if the utility cuts you off.

Two recent episodes explain the government's urgency. In June, an executive order from the Trump administration blocked non-Americans from using the most advanced models from Anthropic, the US AI company. Last year, Microsoft blocked the email account of the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, after he became a target of US sanctions. The business model matters here: Microsoft and Anthropic are American companies, subject to American law, and complying with sanctions is a condition of staying in business. When a supplier is ordered by its own government to switch off a customer, the signed contract counts for little.

Dweck also denied that Brazil is aligning itself with China, even though the country joined Waico, the Beijing-led AI cooperation organization, rather than Pax Silica, the parallel US initiative. The Waico membership was reported in July by Gazeta do Povo, which noted that the group includes authoritarian governments. For the minister, joining the alliance is part of building strategic partnerships, not picking a side.

What we still do not know

So far, the plan exists more as a speech outline than as a document. The interview offered no budget, no deadlines and no list of systems that would gain national redundancy, and there is no public number for how much of the Brazilian government's data and services currently runs on foreign clouds. In an election year, the usual question also hangs over it: does this become state policy, with signed contracts and investments, or remain a program of the current administration?

In practice, three signals are worth watching in the coming months: the publication of tenders and contracts tied to the plan, the reaction of the big cloud providers that serve the government, and the progress of AI regulation in Congress. For companies and public agencies, the plan's own logic delivers a direct message: mapping which foreign suppliers you depend on is the first step, whether or not digital sovereignty ever leaves the paper.