ByteDance's Brazil Data Centre Will Be Its Largest Outside China, and Indigenous Occupiers Have Been on the Site

ByteDance's data centre at the Port of Pecem in Ceara will be the company's largest anywhere outside China, Bloomberg reported on 1 July 2026, at about 200 billion reais, converted by outlets citing the report at between US$37.7 billion and US$39.9 billion. When Brazil's Mines and Energy Minister Alexandre Silveira described the project in October 2025, Reuters reported the figure as 50 billion reais, or about US$9.1 billion.

The site is contested. In June 2026 the Anace people occupied the construction works, as reported by O Povo, and Brazil's federal prosecution service has an open civil inquiry into the environmental licence that allowed building to start.

Reuters reported Silveira in October saying construction would begin within six months at Pecem in Ceara, in a project involving the wind developer Casa dos Ventos, at 300 megawatts, and that President Lula had signed a measure offering federal tax exemptions to attract data centres.

Construction began in January 2026, BNamericas reported. As of the start of July only the pillars were standing, with walls, roofing and the rest of the shell still to come, according to the trade publication w.media, which described a 20 hall campus with an initial 200 megawatts that could eventually approach one gigawatt, operational in late 2027. Other reporting puts initial operations in the third quarter of 2027, with capacity expanding through 2029. The first phase figure is reported inconsistently, at 200 megawatts and at 300.

Casa dos Ventos is not the campus partner. Omnia, the digital infrastructure platform of the Brazilian asset manager Patria Investimentos, is developing and will control the data centre, and received regulatory clearance to do so, per BNamericas. Casa dos Ventos supplies its power.

Omnia and Casa dos Ventos announced a 20 year supply agreement on 18 May 2026 worth about US$2 billion, covering up to 300 average megawatts for the first phase, drawn mainly from the 630 megawatt Ibiapaba wind complex in Ceara with a further contribution from the Dom Inocencio farm in Piaui. Under the structure, Omnia takes a stake in the generation assets rather than simply buying power, and Casa dos Ventos is investing a further 3.5 billion reais in dedicated wind farms. Brazil's electricity regulator Aneel granted the project injunctive relief in March 2026 securing temporary priority for grid connection from 2028, BNamericas reported, in a market where transmission capacity has become contested.

The Anace people, who live around Caucaia and Sao Goncalo do Amarante in Ceara, filed a formal complaint in August 2025 seeking suspension of the environmental licensing, Datacenter Dynamics reported, and the case is documented by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. The Anace published a consultation protocol in 2024. Ceara's state environmental agency, Semace, licensed the project in 2025 without consulting them, and the licensing relied on a simplified environmental report. Brazil's federal prosecution service opened a civil inquiry in December 2025 into irregularities in the licensing, the investigative outlet O Joio e O Trigo reported in April 2026, noting that construction continued while the inquiry ran. The occupation followed in June 2026.

The tax regime built to attract projects of this kind has not landed cleanly. The provisional measure creating the special regime for data centre services, known as Redata, was enacted on 17 September 2025, BDO reported. The Chamber of Deputies approved a Redata bill on 25 February 2026, with an estimated revenue waiver of 7 billion reais over three years, and sent it to the Senate against the expiry of the provisional measure. Subsequent reporting refers to a further bill to recreate Redata, numbered 278/2026, still awaiting a Senate vote.

Three questions are open. Whether the environmental licence survives the federal inquiry and the Anace claim. Whether Redata becomes law or remains a policy Brazil keeps re-legislating. And which investment figure is real, given that the reported total moved from 50 billion to 200 billion reais in nine months without a published breakdown of what the larger number covers.

The objection now sitting in front of the licence has nothing to do with data. It is about land, and about who has to be asked before the concrete is poured.