China’s Huawei and ByteDance are reportedly planning major investments in Brazil’s cloud sector, at a time when the US has been warning of growing Chinese influence in Latin America.

US-sanctioned Huawei is planning to announce a deal to use data centres operated by Dataprev, the state-run company that manages the country’s social data systems, Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported.

Huawei is also in talks with Edge UOL, a cloud services division of conglomerate Grupo UOL PagSeguro, the report said.

Data centre deals

The reported deal follows a meeting last month by executives from Huawei and Edge UOL in Dongguan, China.

Brazil’s secretary of digital governance Ricardo Leite and Huawei Cloud Latin America president Mark Chen also attended the meeting.

Chen said at the time that Huawei Cloud wanted to be “the bridge between China and Latin America” and said it was working with Edge UOL as a strategic service partner.

Edge UOL chief operating officer Rodrigo Lobo said at the time that the companies’ partnership was intended to expand into infrastructure, cybersecurity and AI.

ByteDance is also considering new data centre projects in Brazil, including a potential 300-megawatt data centre in Brazil’s Ceara region that has the potential to triple in scale, Folha de S. Paulo reported.

The project is being discussed with renewable energy provider Casa dos Ventos, the report said.

Last year the two countries signed a cooperation agreement on AI during a state visit by Chinese president Xi Jinping to Brasilia, including joint work on platforms, training and AI safeguards.

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited Beijing last month for the China-Celac Forum.

Non-alignment

At that event Márcio Elias, the executive secretary for Brazil’s Ministry of Industry and Trade, said Brazil hoped to integrate Chinese AI technology into Brazilian factories to boost productivity and competitiveness, local Chinese media reported.

Lula said at the event that Brazil wanted to “learn to work together” with China on AI and other technologies.

Brazil has followed a path of strategic non-alignment for years in which it has sought to cultivate ties with both the US and China.

US officials have warned that the increasing influence of Chinese companies in Latin America could lead to national security risks including data theft, surveillance and strategic leverage.

Huawei has been under US sanctions since 2019 and ByteDance’s TikTok platform has faced the risk of a ban in the US since last year, with both companies coming under scrutiny for allegedly posing national security risks over data and other issues, something the companies deny.

Last December Brazilian authorities suspended the construction of a plant for Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD in the country, saying construction workers worked in “slavery-like” conditions and were victims of human trafficking.