Brazil's federal government has signed into law the bill creating Redata — the Regime Especial de Tributação para Serviços de Datacenter (Special Tax Regime for Data Center Services). Law 15,504, dated 15 September 2026, was published in a special edition of the Diário Oficial da União (the federal gazette). It removes tax on the purchase of equipment for these facilities — provided the company accepts a set of commitments on energy, water, research and capacity reserved for the Brazilian market.
What is suspended
The regime suspends four federal taxes on purchases of machinery, equipment and components destined for data centers:
- PIS/Pasep and Cofins (federal social contributions levied on revenue);
- PIS/Pasep-Importação and Cofins-Importação, their import counterparts;
- IPI, the federal manufactured-goods tax, on imports and on goods leaving an industrial plant;
- import duty.
The suspension runs for five years and converts into a zero rate only after the company demonstrates it has met the regime's conditions. It is the same design used in other Brazilian special regimes: the incentive starts as a suspension and becomes a permanent exemption only once compliance is verified. Companies that fall short face the penalties written into the text.
The five conditions
Article 11-B of the law sets out obligations that are cumulative — not a menu to choose from, but a full list:
- 10% of processing capacity made available to the domestic market or to scientific institutions;
- compliance with sustainability criteria to be set by regulation;
- contracting the entirety of electricity demand through supply contracts "from renewable sources", in the words of the statute;
- a water usage effectiveness (WUE) index of no more than 0.05 litres per kilowatt-hour;
- investment of 2% of the value of the goods purchased in research, development and innovation with qualified institutions.
Under the rule approved in the Câmara dos Deputados (the lower house), at least 40% of that research investment must benefit the North, Northeast and Central-West regions. The law also requires the publication of sustainability reports.
The water limit is the most demanding figure in the package. Data centers cool their equipment with air, with water, or with a combination of the two, and a ceiling of 0.05 litres per kilowatt-hour pushes projects towards cooling architectures that use almost no water — an engineering constraint, not merely a paper one.
A discount for three regions
Data centers built in the North, Northeast and Central-West have their requirements cut by 20%. In practice, mandatory research investment falls from 2% to 1.6%, and capacity reserved for the domestic market falls from 10% to 8%.
Where the text came from
Redata began as PL 278/26, a bill by congressman José Guimarães (PT-CE), with Aguinaldo Ribeiro (PP-PB) as rapporteur. It moved through Congress amid debate over the electricity demands of artificial-intelligence infrastructure: specialists heard in the Senado (the Senate) in the weeks before the vote warned that training and running AI models consumes substantial amounts of power.
The text sets no deadline for regulating the sustainability criteria, a task left to the executive branch — and that is where it will be decided how much the conditions are worth in practice.
With information from the text of Law 15,504 published by the Planalto, and from the Câmara and Senado news agencies.
