August 2026 was a month of technology constraints. Around the world, nations and companies grappled with electricity, computing capacity, infrastructure and dependence on technology controlled by others. Digital sovereignty increasingly seems less like a buzzword and more like a practical concern.

RAM prices are still high and are expected to remain high through 2027.

The Latin America and Caribbean Region

The Dominican Republic has 3 new submarine cables. You can read more specifics through Google’s announcement. This will likely boost internet resilience in the region. The cables being owned by a hyperscaler aren’t a step toward digital sovereignty; they are Someone Else’s Infrastructure. This may be an economic boon for the region.

Brazil is explicitly pursuing technological sovereignty rather than choosing the US or China. On August 20, Brazil announced about R$2.3 billion, roughly US$444 million, for AI infrastructure. R$1.3 billion goes toward a Rio project involving China’s Huawei and iFlytek, while another roughly R$1 billion is going toward a Rio Grande do Norte AI supercomputer that officials expect Nvidia to supply. Brazil says the latter should rank among the world’s ten most powerful AI systems.

Brazil also announced plans for a national cloud, an algorithmic-transparency center, and a semiconductor partnership with Spain based on open RISC-V architecture. The government explicitly says its strategy is not to depend on one company, technology or country. While every other nation is seemingly making decisions regarding China and the United States, Brazil has chosen neither and both.

Uruguay has provided a rather spectacular warning about compute projects and electricity assumptions. The collapse of Tether’s roughly $120 million Bitcoin-mining venture in Uruguay was fairly straightforward. Tether apparently regarded its contracted electricity supply for the bitcoin mining operation as something that could be increased, while state utility UTE regarded it as the maximum allocation. As the operation grew, insufficient electricity became a serious problem. After attempts to resolve the dispute failed, UTE ultimately cut power and the operation shut down.

Colombia just discovered that terrestrial connectivity has its own geography problem. The government cancelled procurement for a proposed 1,600-km fiber network through the Amazon, citing financial uncertainty and technical, environmental and coverage risks.

This helps make the case for LEO satellite broadband, microwave links and hybrid networks, though a recent study examining exposed Starlink-connected hosts found disproportionately elevated security risks in Latin America, including outdated or vulnerable operating systems and protocols.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Google Cloud have set up a new Gemini Experience Center (GEC) in Mexico City to help increase AI adoption. Amazon’s Prime Video also announced more than $2 billion of investment in Latin America from 2027 through 2030, covering Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Chile.

Overall, it’s a mixed bag. Aside from Brazil, it would seem that most of this has to do with companies outside the region tapping the market within the region. Brazil seems intent on building out its digital sovereignty.

The rest of the world

On August 31, the European Union awarded French state-owned Bull a €387.8 million contract for LUMI-AI, a new AI supercomputer to be installed in Finland. The demand for Europe’s existing publicly backed AI computing infrastructure is already exceeding capacity. LUMI-AI is expected online in the second half of 2027 and will use AMD processors, IBM storage and Nokia networking.

Germany’s Fraunhofer institutes and SAP announced work on ApeiroRA, an open-source, vendor-neutral cloud/edge architecture intended to reduce dependence on American hyperscalers. Fraunhofer explicitly identifies that dependence as a threat to European technological sovereignty. Overall, the EU continues pushing toward digital sovereignty. India is pursuing its own strategy of aggressively developing domestic capability while also getting investment from hyperscalers.

With Microsoft committing $20.5 billion to India, including expansion of its data-centre infrastructure, there is no question that the investment is flowing. India’s data center capacity has increased significantly, though there is some risk associated with the power and cooling requirements. At the same time, the Indian government is pushing for indigenous semiconductors, AI models and compute infrastructure. It seems India is leveraging hyperscalers while building out its own digital sovereignty.

China has been busy too, of course. The Chinese government is replacing the Chinese Government edition of Windows 10 with domestically developed operating systems like Linux distributions of KylinOS and UOS. This fits with China’s trend to reduce dependence on foreign technology, so it isn’t surprising.

The United States is having a lot of public push-back on data centers, notably in Texas and Virginia. Texas now has a moratorium on new data center grid connections until regulatory agencies can audit proposed data centers seeking connection to the state’s electric grid. Virginia, the world’s largest data center market, is seeing increased costs for electricity. There is no moratorium in Virginia; instead the Governor chose to make the owners of data centers responsible for transmission costs to the data centers.

Editor’s note: About the Global Lense. Taran Rampersad, a frequent contributor to TechNewsTT since its inception, has stepped up to do a monthly roundup of technology developments from his perspective. He comes to this assignment from the perspective of a technologist with a clear eye on what is likely to prove most important to regional development.

About the author

He is a published author on virtual worlds and was part of the team of writers at WorldChanging.com that won the Utne Award and an outspoken advocate of simplifying processes and bending technology’s use to society’s needs.

His volunteer work related to technology and disasters has been mentioned by the media (BBC), and is one of the plank-owners of combining culture with ICT in the Caribbean (ICT) through CARDICIS and has volunteered time towards those ends.

As an amateur photographer, he has been published in educational books, magazines, websites and NASA’s ‘Sensing The Planet’. These days, he’s focusing more on his writing and technology experiments. Feel free to contact him through Facebook Messenger.