Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a key instrument of China’s strategic projection in Latin America. Beyond expanding AI applications, Beijing is seeking to expand its presence in the infrastructure that supports them, including data centers, cloud services, and telecommunications networks. The concern is that its growing control over these assets could strengthen China’s intelligence and defense capabilities, expand its influence over the region’s digital ecosystems, and enable it to leverage Latin American data to train its AI models, providing strategic advantages in the event of asymmetric warfare or conflict.
“Building a complete ecosystem that integrates data collection, transmission, and processing allows the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) both to perpetuate its hold on power and to position itself advantageously in the digital domain,” Juan Pablo Toro, senior researcher at the Chilean think tank AthenaLab, told Diálogo.
At the same time, China is also seeking to shape international AI governance. In July, 29 countries, including Brazil and Cuba, signed the agreement establishing the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO), an initiative promoted by Beijing. Months earlier, the World Data Organization (WDO) was established to promote global data governance, with Brazil’s state-owned information technology company Serpro serving on its governing board. According to the Jamestown Foundation, the WDO could serve as a CCP influence platform linked to the United Front.
As such, Beijing is exporting not only infrastructure and technology but also seeking to shape the standards and rules that will govern the digital ecosystem. This could deepen technological dependencies that are difficult to reverse, reduce Latin American countries’ ability to choose alternative providers, and increase vulnerabilities related to digital sovereignty.
Cloud computing and AI: The expansion of China’s digital ecosystem
China’s plan to develop industrial datasets, unveiled in June, identifies data as a strategic resource for both economic development and national security. Developing AI models requires massive amounts of data and significant computing capacity, giving strategic value to the international expansion of cloud infrastructure and data centers. The cloud is far more than a storage platform — it is the infrastructure where data are collected and processed, AI models are trained, and critical services operate. “Data are the oil of the modern era. They not only provide information but also feed the algorithms that are later used to model or predict human behavior,” Toro said.
Huawei represents the most advanced example of this strategy. In addition to operating data centers in five Latin American countries, the company has expanded its AI Cloud infrastructure in Brazil and Mexico while developing an ecosystem that integrates cloud computing, AI, big data, and workforce training. In Argentina, for example, Huawei’s agreement with the Argentine Federation of Farmers (AFA) includes the use of AI to support the digitalization and management of the agricultural sector. In Chile, Huawei provides AI Cloud services to the energy, telecommunications, and industrial sectors and has integrated China’s DeepSeek AI models into its platform.
The strategy is to offer governments, businesses, and institutions cloud services, data analytics, AI, and applications through a single technology platform. However, concentrating critical functions within one ecosystem increases dependence on Chinese providers and could provide Beijing with a tool for strategic leverage through potential restrictions on access or service interruptions. Moreover, the greater the volume of data managed by these platforms, the greater the risk that they could be used for strategic purposes, including training AI models.
These risks increase with the expansion of Chinese companies considered sensitive for security reasons throughout Latin America. In April, iFlytek signed an agreement with Brazil’s state-owned technology company Serpro to develop Portuguese-language AI models and cloud services. The company has been on the U.S. Entity List since 2019 for its role in developing surveillance technologies used against the Uyghur minority.
Tencent has also expanded its regional presence through an agreement with a Brazilian provider to distribute its cloud platform across Latin America. Its parent company, Tencent Holdings, was added in 2025 to the U.S. Department of Defense’s list of companies considered to have ties to China’s military.
Beijing’s digital architecture
Having strengthened its position in cloud computing and AI services, China has increasingly expanded into the physical infrastructure that underpins this digital ecosystem. Semiconductor — essential to AI, defense systems, and critical infrastructure — have become the latest focus of this strategy, as illustrated by negotiations announced in May between Brazil’s state-owned semiconductor company Ceitec and China’s Global Power Technology to produce chips in Brazil. The initiative reflects the growing interest of Chinese companies in expanding their presence in a sector that is strategic for digital infrastructure, AI, and numerous industrial and defense applications.
Semiconductor production complements investments in data centers and submarine cables: Chips provide computing power, data centers host and train AI models, and submarine cables carry nearly 99 percent of the world’s intercontinental data traffic.
“When strategic technologies are transferred, there are always political and security implications that extend far beyond their technical or commercial value. With intrusive technologies, the cloud, submarine cables, and data centers become a gold mine of information,” Toro said.
Data centers represent one of the pillars of this strategy because they concentrate the computing power required to train AI models. Brazil has emerged as Latin America’s leading market for data center investments, including those by Chinese companies, thanks to abundant energy resources and government incentives. Alibaba is seeking to expand its infrastructure for AI workloads, while ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is building its largest data center outside China at the Port of Pecém, in the northeastern state of Ceará.
China’s expansion also extends to submarine telecommunications infrastructure. HMN Tech (formerly Huawei Marine Networks) participates in more than 10 percent of submarine cable projects worldwide. These include the Suriname-Guyana Submarine Cable System, developed by HMN Tech, and the Pacific Optical Fiber project, which connects Peru and Bolivia using technology supplied by the company.
For Latin America, the main challenge is not any single technology but the gradual integration of critical infrastructure into a single technological ecosystem driven by companies operating under China’s regulatory framework. “The Chinese regime has a vision in which politics, economics, security, and technology are integrated toward a single objective,” Toro said. In response, Latin American countries will need to strengthen data protection, diversify technology providers, and develop their own capabilities to safeguard their digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy.
