ReData left the drawing board. The Senate plenary approved Bill 278 of 2026 on September 1st, creating the Special Tax Regime for Datacenter Services: a five-year suspension of Import Tax, PIS Cofins, PIS Cofins on imports, and IPI on equipment purchases.
Anyone who followed the R$ 2 trillion technology picture through 2029 remembers the bottleneck: building a data center in Brazil cost 36% more than in the US, mostly from taxes. The window that was closed by cost just opened by law.
The price of the incentive and the design that accelerates
The Receita Federal estimates a fiscal impact of R$ 5.2 billion in 2026, falling to R$ 1 billion in each of the two following years.
The decay is no accident: the incentive peaks first, precisely to pull forward the investment decisions that were blocked by entry costs. It is a regime designed to convert queues into construction in the first cycles, not to subsidize eternity.
The counter-commitments: an incentive with industrial-policy strings
Qualification demands four counter-commitments:
- Domestic market: at least 10% of effective supply directed to the national market.
- Clean energy: honor contracted demand with clean or renewable sources.
- Water: a water-efficiency index equal to or below 0.05 liters per kilowatt-hour.
- Local investment: 2% of equipment value invested in the country (8% and 1.6% in the North, Northeast, and Midwest, with 40% of investments in those regions).
The design shows what the legislator learned from the global data center race: an incentive without strings buys a warehouse; an incentive with strings buys a supply chain, clean energy, and regions. The 38 GW in the grid queue now compete for a regime that rewards those who build with the country, not just in it.
The origin matters: from expired decree to law
The benefit was born as Provisional Measure 1318 of 2025, which lost validity, and was reintroduced as a bill, approved on September 1st. The path is not a procedural detail.
An incentive via provisional measure expires, and a ten-year project backed by one does not close a spreadsheet. Via law, the regime gives legal certainty for long-term CAPEX, which is the currency of data centers. It is the difference between a promise and a policy.
What changes in practice for the Brazilian market
In order of appearance: operators redo project spreadsheets (CAPEX falls), stuck projects return to the table, and installed national capacity grows on a renewable base with water-efficiency requirements.
For those contracting infrastructure (not building it), the effect arrives filtered: more local supply, more competitive prices in the medium term, and the growing option of running Brazilian workloads on Brazilian soil, with the latency the border cannot deliver and national jurisdiction for LGPD requirements.
Conclusion
From a 38-gigawatt queue to a queue with an incentive: the window that could have closed just opened. ReData does not build data centers, but it removes the brake that kept Brazil out of the construction race.
What remains is execution: sanction, regulation, and construction. The structural reading does not change, though: when entry costs fall, capital that watched from afar starts watching up close. Brazil just removed the main reason to watch from afar.