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MP 1318/2025 (signed and published in the Diário Oficial da União on 18 September 2025) creates two special tax regimes in one instrument: REPES (IT-export services) and REDATA (datacenter services). REDATA is the industrial-policy-relevant half: it zero-rates federal taxes (PIS/Cofins, IPI and import duties on the underlying capital goods, per the implementing text) on servers, storage arrays, networking gear, cooling systems and other datacenter equipment purchased or imported by qualifying operators, effective from 1 January 2026.
Eligibility is conditioned, not unconditional state aid: beneficiaries must (i) source 100% of operating energy from renewable/clean, zero-carbon-emission generation; (ii) commit 2% of project investment to in-country R&D; (iii) offer at least 10% of data processing/storage capacity to the domestic market (with a 20-point reduction in both the domestic-offering and R&D thresholds for projects sited in the North, Northeast or Center-West regions — Brazil's standard regional-development lever); and (iv) give preference to Brazilian-manufactured components where available, echoing the national-content clause already seen in the BNDES Máquinas e Serviços line used to finance Scala Data Centers (2025-11-27-brazil-bndes-scala-data-centers-machinery-loan).
The Finance Ministry frames REDATA as the fiscal leg of the National Datacenter Policy (Política Nacional de Datacenters, PNDC), itself nested under the Lula government's flagship Nova Indústria Brasil (NIB) industrial-policy programme (2024-01-22-brazil-nova-industria-brasil-nib), which already lists "digital transformation" among its mission areas. Government estimates put 2026 forgone-tax incentives at R$5.2 billion (~USD 1bn), with the Ministry projecting the regime could help unlock up to R$2 trillion (~USD 375bn) in private hyperscale/datacenter investment over the following decade — a scale that places this well above the routine, single-operator BNDES loans already in the register and justifies a severity of 4 (quant-anchored on the disclosed R$ figures) against a national multi-year fiscal-incentive architecture rather than a one-off grant.
As a Medida Provisória, REDATA has immediate force of law but requires Congressional conversion into an ordinary statute within the standard 60(+60)-day MP window; failure to convert would lapse the regime, so downstream tracking should watch for the converted lei ordinária.
fiscal incentives to compete for hyperscale/AI-datacenter capex (alongside GCC and Southeast Asian data-sovereignty/investment regimes already in the register under digital-sovereignty and latam-em-investment-promotion themes).
data-capacity set-aside create a soft dual mandate: attract foreign hyperscaler capex while also building a national server/networking equipment supply base and reserving compute capacity domestically — relevant to ICT-hardware exporters (networking, cooling, server OEMs) assessing Brazil market entry.
channel already used by Scala Data Centers, giving Brazil a combined tax-exemption + subsidised-financing stack for datacenter investment.
the mandatory window, and whether the converted text preserves the 10%/2%/100%-renewable thresholds or amends them.
versus merely reduced, and the precise duration of the regime (GTA's state-act record cites a 2026-2030 window; the primary MP text should be checked at conversion for the final validity period).