Nvidia hosts first AI Day in Brazil as country prepares $4bn push into artificial intelligence
The event in São Paulo drew more than 500 attendees and showcased sovereign AI projects aligned with Brazil's national technology plan
Nvidia held its inaugural AI Day in São Paulo in January, bringing together more than 500 developers, startups and partners around Brazil's ambitions to build domestic artificial intelligence capacity.
The event was framed by the Brazilian Artificial Intelligence Plan for 2024 to 2028, known as "AI for the Good of All," which outlines more than 50 initiatives spanning public services, research and development, infrastructure, industry and government.
The Brazilian government plans to invest roughly $4 billion through 2028 to support the programme, covering infrastructure, training, public services, innovation and governance.
Nvidia's contribution centred on technical enablement, with four Deep Learning Institute labs covering AI agent creation, large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a technique that allows AI models to draw on external data sources when generating responses.
The company said the LLM and RAG sessions were specifically aimed at accelerating linguistic diversity, a priority for a country whose Portuguese-language data is underrepresented in most foundation models.
An all-conference plenary hosted by Nvidia's Inception startup programme featured Howard Wright, the chipmaker's vice president of startup ecosystem, alongside a panel on sovereign AI partnerships and talent development using Nvidia's NeMo software and NIM microservices.
Brazilian partners used the event to demonstrate locally built applications.
Amadeus AI showed fine-tuning techniques for large language models and cost-effective GPU pipelines, while WideLabs presented national dataset initiatives, sovereign AI platforms and a synthetic data pipeline called Nemotron Personas Brazil.
"At Nvidia AI Days, we were able to gain a much more thorough understanding of the Nvidia NeMo framework," said Rodrigo Malossi, cofounder and chief technology officer of WideLabs.
Biotechnology startup Biofy highlighted the role of GPU acceleration in genomics, with cofounder and chief executive Paulo Perez saying Nvidia's hardware and frameworks speed up DNA analysis by hundreds of times compared with traditional CPU-based methods.
Nvidia said the regional developer ecosystem would continue to support Brazil's national plan with a focus on LLM development, healthcare and financial services.
The company added that it is partnering with Claro, the Brazil-founded telecommunications provider and Nvidia's first cloud partner in Latin America, to accelerate sovereign AI efforts across the region.
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The Recap
- NVIDIA held its first AI Day in São Paulo with broad attendance.
- Brazil plans about $4 billion investment through 2028 for AI.
- NVIDIA is partnering with Claro to accelerate sovereign AI.
