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Only reinforces the point that relying on american infrastructure as a critical piece of your stack, in 2026, is a liability.

This is not a real problem outside of niche industries

American companies are great to do business with.

Most countries, including Brazil, simply don’t have the capability to pull this on their own. Not enough tech talent nor infrastructure

> It is worth noting that despite all this cheap sovereignty talk from Brazil’s president, in practice Brazil would not be able to operate Pix at that scale without heavily relying on American hyperscalers companies.

> American companies are great to do business with.

US officials involving themselves in your national market because they are unhappy with the market share of their companies in it, with the implicit threat of stopping other areas of trade if you dont allow the companies to gain a larger market share makes US companies too untrustworthy to do business with. If Trump implements a trade ban for Brazil, will these hyperscalers continue providing the service at their own risk, or are they going to prioritize their state over their customers? I would assume the answer will be the latter. Given that, I believe it is in Brazil's (and most other states) best interest to divest and reduce partnerships with companies operating in the US

> US officials involving themselves in your national market because they are unhappy with the market share of their companies in it

Just to clarify, for anyone who’s been paying attention to the matter, it’s clear that the true reason for that Section 301 investigation is not due to Pix stealing market share of MC/Visa. In fact, if you check Brazil’s central bank own data, Credit Card usage has not gone down since Pix came in. What Pix really replaced was physical cash.

The fact is that Brazil’s (current) government has been publicly on the other side of Americans interests for a long time, even before Trump’s term. e.g. blatantly ignoring Iran sanctions https://www.cruz.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sen-cruz...

Why would Brazil's government be on the side of American interests on a matter like this?

Pix is clearly mentioned as one of the topics for that investigation due to 'unfairness' and 'harming the competition'.

There are exceptions but the "hyperscalers" and pretty much anything that handles personal information is highly toxic and should be fiercely avoided.

> Most countries, including Brazil, simply don’t have the capability to pull this on their own. Not enough tech talent nor infrastructure

One really wonders how the internet could even have happened before the hyperscalers appeared.

Mostly grumpy IT people handling small racks running VMWare in their office and taking 6 months to set up a VM for you.

I am not joking.

> I am not joking.

Well, I was...

> and taking 6 months to set up a VM for you.

Your sysadmins were extraordinarily grumpy. Were you working with the ur-bofh?

You are incorrect.

What went down were apps from banks that use PIX, not the core infrastructure.

That is responsibility of the banks. It means private banks like Itau and Nubank rely on Amazon, not the Central Bank. They relied on those hyperscalers for their operation, and their gateways went down with it.

PIX has sovereign, private infrastructure on brazillian soil managed by Banco Central. NIC.br and other essential services do the same.

PIX is ours.

This is a minor technicality, if private banks are down then the SPI is basically useless. Banks can send money to each other but clients can’t see it.

> What went down were apps

Plus, this is an oversimplification.

Transaction authorization, Fraud/AML screening, account validation are not just part of an “app”, they are core functionality of private banks operations, and they are made scalable by big cloud providers.

The true scaling burden is on private banks not the BCB

> The true scaling burden is on private banks not the BCB

Exactly. That is one of the aspects that allow for the system to be sovereign and scalable. Banco Central controls the core, and that's all it needs to.

This is good design. Descentralized, modern, resilient and efficient.

> Banco Central controls the core, and that's all it needs to. This is good design. Descentralized, modern, resilient and efficient.

I agree. But was that not the case before Pix/SPI? It really didn’t change the status quo.

The STR (transfer reserve system), which SPI is still fully dependent in practice btw, is decentralized, modern and efficient.

The biggest change here was scale and adoption by private banks and end users, not sovereign infra.

That is an offshoot topic which is, in my opinion, irrelevant for the sovereignty discussion.

I'm here just to clear out the confusion regarding the infrastructural pieces. The core PIX is undeniably sovereign and state-owned, and the Amazon downtime was lack of resilience on the part of the banks (which they could have totally designed around but decided not to).

> I'm here just to clear out the confusion regarding the infrastructural pieces. The core PIX is undeniably sovereign and state-owned

Sure, I can see the confusion, I should have made that clearer.

Let me rephrase it: the "core PIX" is mostly an implementation of ISO20022 (pain,pacs, etc) messaging on top of HTTP APIs and BCB's own ledgers, plus a centralized KV datastore (Dict).

The implementation was excellent, but there is no technical moat in the "state-owned" part of the solution

The biggest technical challenges were, by design, delegated to the private sector, heavily relying on US hyperscalers to achieve Pix's operational requirements.

There is a wide misconception that state stuff needs to be fully state-developed. I don't subscribe to that view. Delegating and designing just-enough simple solutions, avoiding bureaucratic tanglements, is an immense challenge and done beautifully in this case.

The other direction (not using standards, owning parts you don't need) would make it for slower adoption, lots of new government responsibilities and very few additional sovereign control. It would be worse.

Building a "technical moat" is for companies which have direct competition. The state can solve this by making regulations. It doesn't need that technical moat, simplicity is better suited. It's acting exactly at the intersection it needs: in the regulation, delegation and coordination realm, not execution.

Yes, but my point was more nuanced, I didn't mean to say that the state needs a fully owned solution.

The original article opens up with "Pix is igniting a geopolitical and commercial battle."

The point I was trying to make, specially in the last paragraph, was that: Brazil doesn't really have full control, or the capability, to operate Pix without US infrastructure. Therefore, it is not smart, to engage in a geopolitical, ideological battle against the US. If Brazil wants to tough it out and claim sovereignty, then it must be willing to walk away and build its own infra.

Case in point: the recent US-Canada tensions were enough for the Canadian government to consider cancelling the purchase of American-made F-35 fighter jets.

Is the Brazilian government willing to do the same? Is it even in its best interest to do so? In my opinion, no, hence the aggressive anti-US rethoric from Lula must stop

Brazil has not started in any ideological battle regarding this. It has developed a national technology, and it allows other payment systems to coexist peacefully in the spirit of honest competition.

The ideological and geopolitical provocations comes from the US. The government is merely defending itself, and being decisive about our sovereignty is not an act of aggression. It's just good statesmanship.

The phrase "PIX is ours" wasn't even directed at the US. It was promoted because a previous Brazilian president tried to attach is personal name to the technology. It was later adopted in that defensive posture, but it was never about fostering any grievances with other payment systems.

Data centers are a commodity, and the US gets tremendous revenue from Brazilian businesses that use it (fourth largest AWS customer location). It's a symbiotic relationship, and there are other countries able to provide computing power if we need to cut ties with it. If that happens, businesses can rent those from somewhere else.

You underestimate our ability to handle these things. Watch us.

In Brazil case, there's actually public banks, and they use Brazilian servers.

It was not. TED had to talk with banks, only the final settlement went thought Central Bank.

With Pix, banks don't talk with each other. They are basically using Central Bank API to send and receive money.

before it was Bank Z ---> Bank Y

With Pix it's Bank X ---> SPI/BC ---> Bank B

I don’t even understand what you mean by “banks had to talk to each other” and why you are referring to TED in the past tense when it’s still the largest settlement method by BRL amount

Because TED is not the only way to send money now...? It's basically legacy, although yes, still used. Very rare you'll see Person to person/business using TED. Basically business to person...

And yes, literally banks had to "talk" with each other. Which is why it was paid and slower in first place and didn't worked 24/7.

I suggest you go read the SFN messaging manuals from BCB if you truly want to understand how interbank communication works. It is very well documented.

You clearly don’t know what you are talking about since you are conflating the STR (transfer reserve system) with TED (one of the many settlement methods in STR)

Obviously there's several other ways to send money. I'm talking about the popular ones... The others are niche-systems.

And yes, in TED only the final settlement were done by BCB.

Ultimately, this is all irrelevant.

The goal with Pix was not to increase the total amount of value tranfered, but the amount of small micro-transactions, increasing fluidity and bypassing unecessary bureacratic processes.

TED still wins by raw value, but that amount is irrelevant. It is what is left after the small-fry micro-transactions were liberated from complicated, archaic systems. Those small-fry transactions provided a lot of fluidity to the market, which is the realm in which Visa and Mastercard were supposed to act (incresing consumption) but were unable to compete due to their own legacy devices. They really need to catch up with the competition: those systems and their culture are ancient relics.

So they get to decide when a transaction is in their national interest and do business on that basis?

That sounds like "sovereignty" to me. You don't need to be fully protectionist to be sovereign.

If you have an ax to grind with Lula, just say so.

Don't get me wrong. But mentioning Brazil's president on this meter just adds even more politics to the discussion. Which global systems don't depend somehow on US infrastructure? Do you have the same opinion about the European leaders that are creating/created cloud infrastructure? I believe just one of the parts is really into adversarial talks lately. Brazil is just following what other countries are also doing.

> But mentioning Brazil's president on this meter just adds even more politics to the discussion.

This quote is literally from the linked article — he is mentioned there

> Do you have the same opinion about the European leaders that are creating/created cloud infrastructure?

I don’t understand the question, I think it’d be great to have an European AWS equivalent just for the sake of competition, but as far as I know, we are very far from that

As long as the foreign companies operate within the country under the country's laws, it shouldn't be a big problem. But being dependent on only one vendor and not having redundancy in the system is a problem though. This is why cash is important to provide the ultimate redundancy against all technological and infrastructural failures.

Funny annecdote: I have a friend who worked at iFood (brazilian food delivery company) and apparently they moved their entire AWS stack to us-east-1 because sa-east-1 did not have enough capacity to handle the load they had. This is why iFood has a very high latency* during user interactions.

*: for people used to online gaming

Context is important, the Brazil's President said that about USA investigations with allegations that Pix is a "unfair business practices"[0] he is not at all saying that Pix is "100% powered by Brazil", in his political proselytism he does make clear that Brazil and USA are partners by centuries and should keep being.

0. https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cm2vrnq17vdo

Please, he literally went on national TV on Brazil’s Independence day to claim that

“We will defend PIX from any attempt at privatization. PIX belongs to Brazil, it's public, free, and will remain so.”

Lula has been historically hostile to the US for ideological reasons.

He’s done plenty to undermine that relation, stemming from attacking the dollar dominance, ignoring Iran sanctions, to indirectly financing the Ukraine war by becoming the largest buyer of cheap Russian oil — and that’s why we have those investigations going on

Most of these could could be put another way as protecting sovereignty (and that would be the most charitable interpretation IMHO). Examples:

- "being hostile for ideological reasons" becomes entirely warranted when you consider the many CIA regime-change operations in the past.

- "Undermining the relation" (with the US) is just being smart about how much dependency one has on external factors, like exchange rates and infrastructure.

- The "investigations" are political posturing. PIX is not "unfair business practice", its a modern, cheap, state-of-the-art payments system that is better than what private businesses like MasterCard and Visa are willing to offer. I can think of plenty of ways they could offer actual value to customers so they can still be relevant. The fact that they don't, and chose to try and lobby against it tells me that its a lot cheaper to just buy some politicians and manufacture some controversy instead.

> The "investigations" are political posturing. PIX is not "unfair business practice"

Agree

> its a modern, cheap, state-of-the-art payments system that is better than what private businesses like MasterCard and Visa are willing to offer. I can think of plenty of ways they could offer actual value to customers so they can still be relevant.

This is a common misconception. Pix is a form of bank transfer, not a full blown payment infra like MC/Visa. They are different products, Pix doesn't make credit cards irrelevant.

Per BCB statistics: In 2020, before Pix implementation, credit cards accounted for 2% of the monthly BRL volume transacted (~ 200M BRL)

As of 2025Q4: credit cards still accounted .... for the same 2% (~ 800M BRL)

The main question is: historically, why haven't credit cards been more popular in Brazil, even before Pix?

You'll find your answer looking at structural issues (high interest, delinquency rates, bad credit offerings ...), not technical concerns

> Lula has been historically hostile to the US for ideological reasons.

Care to elaborate and give examples?

This is just a legacy of the hopefully-soon-to-be past. We all went way to hard on the aws bandwagon (myself included). I worked for a bit in the past for a company doing 100 mio. API requests daily off of 6 boring old servers.

There is no explicit need for AWS in this. But it was probably easier to build since it is what we are used to.

Yeah we need to accept that sovereignty costs money. American hyperscalers are the cheapest alternative- but freedom isn't free.

It was not Pix being down, though. This is about banks using US cloud providers. The issue here was with private banks even.

As far I remember, Banco do Brasil and Caixa - both public banks, didn't went down, because they use Brazilian owned servers...

… and yet they both suffer from availability issues despite not having nearly the same scale as e.g. Nubank who uses AWS

Caixa was down yesterday: https://www.techtudo.com.br/google/amp/noticias/2026/05/caix...

Baby steps. If AWS starts unfairly exploiting its market position the way visa and mastercard do then brazil will move pix to another provider