Lula da Silva is back on a plane. This time, the destination is India. He isn’t going for the scenery or the cricket. He’s chasing the one thing every aging world leader thinks will save their legacy from the scrap heap of history: a seat at the high table of artificial intelligence.
It’s a long flight from Brasília to New Delhi. Plenty of time to flip through briefing papers on "sovereign AI," a term that has become the ultimate buzzword for nations that realized, about five minutes too late, that they’ve outsourced their entire digital nervous system to three guys in Menlo Park. Lula wants Brazil to stop being a mere consumer of Silicon Valley’s leftovers. He wants a seat at the AI Summit, and he wants Narendra Modi to help him build a southern firewall against the total dominance of the North.
But let’s be real. Talk is cheap, and server racks are expensive.
Brazil recently unveiled its "AI for Good" plan, a $4 billion ambition designed to make the country a global contender. On paper, it looks great. In reality, $4 billion is what Microsoft spends on coffee and cooling fans in a fiscal quarter. Lula is walking into these bilateral talks with a massive chip on his shoulder and almost no chips in his warehouses. India, meanwhile, has its own "IndiaAI" mission, fueled by a billion-person dataset and a government that isn't afraid to lean on Big Tech when it gets too loud.
The friction here isn't just about who builds the best chatbot. It’s about the raw materials of the next century. Lula is pushing for a digital tax—a way to claw back some revenue from the platforms that have treated Brazil like a data-mining colony for two decades. India has flirted with similar ideas, but they’re playing a different game. Modi wants to turn India into the world’s back office for AI training and fine-tuning. Brazil wants to use its green energy grid to host the massive, power-hungry data centers that the Northern Hemisphere is starting to find too "dirty" for its ESG targets.
It’s a trade-off that smells like a trap.
Brazil has the hydro and wind power. India has the engineering scale. Together, they represent a "Global South" bloc that could, theoretically, force Sam Altman or Sundar Pichai to actually answer their emails. But the cost of entry is staggering. You don't just "do" AI. You buy it, piece by piece, from Nvidia. And Jensen Huang doesn't accept "sovereign pride" as a form of currency. Every real ambition Lula has for a homegrown Brazilian LLM trained on Portuguese nuances ends with a wire transfer to Santa Clara.
There’s also the uncomfortable matter of regulation. Lula’s administration is currently entangled in a messy, public divorce with the concept of platform neutrality—just look at the ongoing scorched-earth battle with Elon Musk’s X. He wants AI to be "ethical" and "inclusive." In politician-speak, that often means "easier to monitor." India, having recently passed its own sweeping data protection laws, knows exactly how to balance the rhetoric of innovation with the reality of state control.
The two leaders will likely stand in front of a bank of cameras, shake hands, and sign a Memorandum of Understanding that will be forgotten by the time their respective entourages hit the tarmac. They’ll talk about a "multipolar digital world" and the need to protect local cultures from the flattening effect of Western algorithms. It’s a compelling narrative. It plays well at home.
But behind the handshakes is the cold, hard math of the compute. Brazil’s industry is desperate for automation, but the local grid can barely support the current manufacturing base without regular hiccups. India’s tech sector is booming, but it’s still largely dependent on Western cloud infrastructure.
Lula is betting that he can leverage Brazil’s role as the current G20 chair to force a global conversation on AI governance. He wants a global fund. He wants technology transfers. He wants the kind of stuff that hasn't happened since the invention of the steam engine. He’s trying to negotiate a ceasefire in a war where he hasn't even finished basic training.
By the time he lands back in Brasília, the hype will have already shifted. OpenAI will have dropped a new model, or another multi-billion dollar data center will have been announced in a desert in Arizona. Lula and Modi can talk about sovereignty all they want, but the servers are still running on someone else’s proprietary stack.
How much "sovereignty" can you actually buy when you’re still paying rent to the people who own the cloud?