Data-center law in Brazil

Lei nº 10.257, de 10 de julho de 2001 (Estatuto da Cidade), art. 40

Applies to both

Article 40 of the City Statute makes the plano diretor, approved by municipal law, the basic instrument of a municipality's urban development and expansion policy. The statute does not name data centers, so a data center's siting, zoning, and building parameters follow whatever land use and building rules the applicable municipality's own plano diretor and building code set, not a national data-center rule.

Source: Full text of law

Lei Complementar nº 140, de 8 de dezembro de 2011, art. 13

Applies to both

Lei Complementar nº 140/2011 assigns the environmental licence for a given enterprise or activity to a single competent government among the Union, the states, the Federal District, and the municipalities, ending the concurrent multi-level licensing the earlier framework allowed. The law does not name data centers; determining which government licenses a given data center's construction is a case-by-case application of the law's allocation criteria rather than a data-center-specific rule.

Source: Full text of law

Resolução CONAMA nº 237, de 19 de dezembro de 1997, arts. 1-2

Applies to both

Resolução CONAMA nº 237/1997 defines licenciamento ambiental (the administrative procedure) and licença ambiental (the resulting authorization), and restates the duty that the location, construction, installation, expansion, modification, or operation of an enterprise or activity considered an actual or potential source of pollution, or otherwise capable of causing environmental degradation, requires prior licensing from the competent environmental authority.

The resolution does not name data centers, so a data center licenses under this general duty rather than a data-center-specific procedure.

Source: Full text of law

Lei nº 6.938, de 31 de agosto de 1981, art. 10

Applies to both

Article 10 of the National Environmental Policy Act requires prior environmental licensing from the competent environmental authority before the construction, installation, expansion, or operation of any establishment or activity that is an actual or potential source of pollution or is otherwise capable of causing environmental degradation.

The article does not name data centers, so applying this general facility-licensing duty to one is an inference from its facility-wide scope, not a data-center-specific rule.

Source: Full text of law

Lei nº 10.848, de 15 de março de 2004, art. 1º

Applies to both

Article 1 of Lei nº 10.848/2004 establishes that electricity is commercialized under either the regulated contracting environment or the free contracting environment (ambiente de contratação livre). Article 2, § 1º, includes among the members of the CCEE, the chamber that manages this commercialization, the consumers who qualify under the free-consumer conditions of Lei nº 9.074, de 7 de julho de 1995, arts. 15 and 16.

Neither law names data centers, so a data center's access to the free market turns on meeting those general free-consumer conditions, most often load size, not a data-center-specific rule.

Source: Full text of law

Lei nº 9.433, de 8 de janeiro de 1997, art. 12

Applies to both

Article 12 of the National Water Resources Policy Act subjects to a grant (outorga) from the competent authority the diversion or withdrawal of water from a water body for final consumption, including public supply or use as an input to a production process, and the extraction of groundwater for final consumption or as a production input.

The article does not name data centers, so a data center's water withdrawal for cooling or other operations needs an outorga only insofar as it falls within these general use categories.

Source: Full text of law

Medida Provisória nº 1.318, de 17 de setembro de 2025

Effective 2025-09-18 · Applies to private

Medida Provisória nº 1.318/2025 inserted articles 11-A to 11-J into Lei nº 11.196/2005 (Lei do Bem), creating the Regime Especial de Tributação para Serviços de Datacenter (Redata), suspending or exempting PIS/Pasep, Cofins, IPI, and, where there is no equivalent domestic production, Import Tax, on information and communication technology equipment acquired for implementing, expanding, or maintaining a data center.

In exchange, a habilitated company had to make available at least a share of its processing, storage, and data-handling capacity to the Brazilian market and direct a share of the value of the equipment acquired toward research, development, and innovation programs for the digital economy. At least 40% of those research, development, and innovation resources had to target Brazil's North, Northeast, and Center-West regions.

Article 11-J limited the incentives to five years, with the fiscal benefits for the article 11-C, I to III taxes running only to 31 December 2026.

Under article 62 of the Federal Constitution, a provisional measure loses legal force from its issuance if Congress does not convert it into a law within a constitutional deadline extendable once; the Mesa Diretora do Congresso Nacional declared, on 26 February 2026, that Medida Provisória nº 1.318/2025's validity period ended on 25 February 2026 without conversion, so Redata as this measure created it no longer has legal force.

Source: Full text of law