alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
Brazilian institutions are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to US cloud providers, specially AWS, to be able to process that many transactions.
Earlier this year, when sa-east-1 was down, major banks were forced to suspend Pix payments for nearly 3 hours. When this happens, some people are literally not able to buy anything because that’s their only payment method. So much for “President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva proclaiming a nationwide campaign: “Pix is ours, my friend”.”
Don’t get me wrong, Pix has been a great success and a major achievement, but all this adversarial political talk between the US and Brazil administrations is really cringe, both countries are better doing business together.
[1]https://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2026/02/07/falh...
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.