When people talk about artificial intelligence in Brazil, the conversation usually starts far away: Silicon Valley, a closed model, an API priced in dollars. A good part of what is already in use here was built nearby. In Goiânia, on UFG’s Samambaia campus, the Center of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence — CEIA — is one of the places where that work actually happens.
I live in Goiânia and I pass through UFG. This is a map of what CEIA is, what is already running in Brazil, and what is still missing.
What CEIA is
CEIA was created in 2019 as a public policy of FAPEG, Goiás’s research foundation, inside UFG’s Institute of Informatics. The design is the triple helix: university, government, and company on the same project.
Since 2020 the center has been an Embrapii unit. That changes the funding: the company shares the risk of innovating, instead of only buying a finished report.
On its official site, CEIA reports more than 100 contracted projects, more than 90 partners, more than 750 collaborators, and more than R$40 million in infrastructure. The axes they list are health, logistics, security, energy, and smart cities. Agribusiness shows up in the partnerships.
Inside CEIA there is also AKCIT, the Embrapii Competence Center for immersive technologies: the co-creation arm, not only papers.
How this shows up in daily work
AI in Brazil is not only chatbots. CEIA’s most concrete cases sit in public agencies and in operations.
GAIA, a model for Brazilian Portuguese. In June 2025, at Google for Brasil, Google DeepMind announced GAIA, built at CEIA with ABRIA and the startups Amadeus AI and Nama, on top of Gemma 3. Professor Celso Camilo put the difference simply: it does what other AIs already do, with more semantic information from Brazilian Portuguese. g1 covered the announcement.
The model is already used at the Goiás State Court of Accounts. Auditors retrieve similar cases and filings faster. Maurício Barros, head of the TCE-GO AI service, points to the gain at the end of the line: the court’s eye on roads and school meals. GAIA is on Hugging Face, open for anyone to adapt.
IAGO na Estrada. At the same court, CEIA and INF/UFG automate inspection of asphalt on state highways. Computer vision finds, measures, and classifies pavement faults. The field kit joins camera, GPS, and IMU. The pipeline runs from collection to the auditor’s dashboard. In August 2026 the center presented the project’s progress.
Public administration and industry. CEIA’s site lists, among others, TCE-GO, the State Attorney General’s Office, Copel, Natura, Synkar, Americas Health. Energy, legal work, logistics, health, credit, security. Not an isolated lab. Contracts with people who operate.
The rest of the country
CEIA is not the only place Brazil uses AI. It is a clear cut of what works when a university meets a real demand.
At the federal level, the Brazilian Artificial Intelligence Plan (PBIA) 2024–2028 budgets R$23 billion for infrastructure, training, public service, companies, and regulation. In August 2026 the government announced a supercomputer in Rio Grande do Norte, at PAX, as part of that plan: less dependence on compute hired abroad.
In the public health system, MCTI presented the Intelligent Medicine Technology Institute, at the Hospital das Clínicas / USP complex, with AI for diagnosis and clinical management. It is still a project. It shows the direction.
At the Central Bank, AI in the financial system is among the 2025–2026 regulatory priorities, alongside Pix. Rules, not only speed.
Renderizando diagrama Mermaid...
What is still missing
In an Exame interview, Telma Woerle de Lima Soares, CEIA’s executive director, was clear: Brazil is behind in the race for its own AI. The two main obstacles are not solved by an announcement. Compute infrastructure is missing. Public Portuguese data is not enough to train a frontier model alone.
The path she points to is not copying ChatGPT. It is specializing where Brazil has data nobody else has: health, environment, biodiversity.
That matches what CEIA already does. A Portuguese model. Highway inspection. Energy. Agribusiness. Oversight bodies. Less showcase, more operation.
Why this matters from here
UFG has an Artificial Intelligence degree. Goiânia is no longer only a consumer of foreign tools. There is a center, there are contracts, a published model, and students inside the project.
If you build in Brazil, you do not have to wait for the Valley to invent our use case. Asphalt, school meals, a court filing, Brazilian Portuguese: that is already on the table. CEIA is the nearest proof I have.
Sources
- About CEIA-UFG
- Embrapii unit CEIA-UFG
- Google adopts Portuguese AI built by researchers in Goiás — g1
- Brazil is behind in the race for its own AI, CEIA director says — Exame
- Brazilian Artificial Intelligence Plan — MCTI
- IAGO na Estrada — CEIA / TCE-GO
