In the flooded ruins of Eldorado do Sul, where Brazil's worst climate disaster in decades left thousands homeless and infrastructure devastated, a tale of two reconstructions is unfolding. Just three kilometers apart, they tell the story of who matters in Brazil's digital future—and who doesn't.

On higher ground, safe from future floods, a sprawling "AI City" is rising with unprecedented speed and government support. The 4.75-gigawatt Scala Data Centers complex covers an area larger than 540 football fields, fast-tracked through relaxed regulations and bypassing normal environmental oversight.

Three kilometers away, in makeshift camps, Indigenous Mbya-Guarani families displaced by the 2024 floods remain in temporary shelters—the same communities that have been waiting for proper resettlement since 2018. While Scala's mega-project received immediate regulatory approval and financial incentives, these families continue to face bureaucratic delays and government indifference.

"O Governo Federal tem recursos para desonerar essas empresas," one Indigenous elder told local media, his voice heavy with bitter irony. "The federal government has funds to benefit these companies, but we've been forgotten for years."

This isn't poor planning or unfortunate timing. It's disaster capitalism in its purest form: a calculated exploitation of climate catastrophe that prioritizes corporate profit over Indigenous rights, revealing exactly whose lives matter in Brazil's digital transformation.

This is environmental crime masquerading as progress—and it's happening across Brazil as Big Tech transforms the country into a digital extraction zone.

The new plantations

Fifteen hundred kilometers northeast, in the drought-ravaged state of Ceará, TikTok's parent company ByteDance is preparing to build what could become one of Latin America's largest data centers. The location—a semi-arid region that has declared drought emergencies in 16 of the past 21 years—reveals the calculated cruelty of contemporary digital colonialism.

These facilities aren't just environmentally destructive; they represent a new form of plantation economy. Like the sugar and coffee plantations that once defined Brazil's colonial relationship with Europe, today's data centers extract massive value from the Global South's land, labor, energy, and resources while funneling profits to Silicon Valley and Beijing.

The parallels are stark: vast territorial appropriations, exploited local labor, environmental degradation, and wealth extraction that leaves communities poorer than before. The only difference is that instead of harvesting crops, these digital plantations harvest data and computational power for the global north's AI boom.

Environmental crimes against humanity

While these projects may technically comply with Brazil's weakened environmental regulations, they constitute crimes against ecological balance and human dignity. The ByteDance facility alone could consume up to 900 megawatts—equivalent to a small city—in a region where rural communities face regular blackouts and water shortages.

This isn't just environmental injustice; it's environmental violence. When corporations deliberately site massive, resource-hungry infrastructure in climate-vulnerable areas, knowing full well the impact on already-struggling communities, they commit a form of slow violence that destroys lives and ecosystems over time.

The Eldorado do Sul case reveals the full horror of digital colonialism in action. Indigenous leaders contrast the speed and financial support lavished on Scala's AI megaproject with the years of delay and destruction their communities have endured. While the data center received immediate regulatory approval through fast-tracked, relaxed local laws, the Mbya-Guarani people have been fighting for basic resettlement rights since 2018.

The spatial arrangement is no accident: corporate infrastructure on safe, high ground; Indigenous families in vulnerable, temporary camps below. This isn't just environmental racism—it's a deliberate geography of disposability that uses climate disaster to justify new forms of territorial appropriation.

Disaster capitalism's digital frontier

Brazil's data center boom isn't happening in a vacuum. It's part of a coordinated global strategy to relocate the environmental and social costs of the digital economy to the Global South, where regulatory capture is easier and resistance can be more easily suppressed.

The pattern is consistent across projects: target climate-vulnerable regions where Indigenous and rural communities have the least political power; promise green energy and economic development while bypassing environmental oversight; operate with minimal transparency; extract maximum value while externalizing all costs to the most marginalized populations.

In Eldorado do Sul, this meant relaxing local laws to fast-track Scala's project while Indigenous families waited years for basic support. The company received immediate regulatory approval and financial incentives; the Mbya-Guarani got makeshift camps and bureaucratic delays.

The Brazilian government has become a willing accomplice, offering R$2 trillion in tax incentives while reportedly sidelining the Environment Ministry from key decisions. This isn't governance; it's state-sponsored resource extraction.

The greenwashing machine

Perhaps most insidiously, these projects are marketed as climate solutions. ByteDance claims its Ceará facility will run on wind power, while government officials trumpet Brazil's renewable energy leadership. But this greenwashing obscures a fundamental reality: renewable energy powering extractive infrastructure is still extractive.

When a data center consumes the equivalent of a small city's power—even if it's renewable—that energy could have been used to electrify rural communities, power schools and hospitals, or support genuinely sustainable development. Instead, it's diverted to serve the computational needs of social media algorithms and AI training models that primarily benefit wealthy consumers in the Global North.

The water usage is even more egregious. Data centers require enormous amounts of water for cooling, yet companies routinely refuse to disclose consumption figures. In drought-prone regions like Ceará, this secrecy amounts to environmental sabotage.

Breaking the colonial pattern

Brazil's data center boom represents a crucial test of whether the country can break free from its colonial economic patterns or whether the digital economy will simply create new forms of extraction and dependence.

The early signs are deeply troubling. Projects are being imposed on communities rather than developed with them. Environmental and social costs are being socialized while profits remain private. And the benefits of the digital economy—better connectivity, digital services, technological capacity—are flowing primarily to urban elites and foreign corporations.

This isn't just bad policy; it's a continuation of Brazil's role as a supplier of raw materials—now including land, energy, and data—for the enrichment of global powers. The only difference is that today's colonizers wear Silicon Valley hoodies instead of European military uniforms.

Breaking this pattern requires treating data centers as what they are: extractive industries that must be subject to the same environmental and social controls as mining or petroleum extraction. Communities must have the right to refuse these projects. Companies must be required to disclose all environmental impacts and provide binding commitments for community benefit.

Most importantly, Brazil must ask itself a fundamental question: are we building digital infrastructure to serve our people, or are we sacrificing our people to serve global digital capital?

The floods in Rio Grande do Sul and the droughts in Ceará will pass. But the data centers being built in their wake will extract value from Brazilian land and resources for decades to come. Whether that extraction serves Brazil's development or simply creates new forms of digital colonialism depends on choices being made right now—often in corporate boardrooms and government offices where affected communities have no voice.

The time for choosing is running out.

TikTok, ByteDance, Scala Data Centers, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google did not respond to requests for comment.