Brazil published Decreto 13.065 on July 15, 2026, releasing it in the Diário Oficial da União on July 16. The decree regulates Article 3 of Lei nº 14.968, the law President Lula signed on September 11, 2024 that created the Programa Brasil Semicondutores (Brasil Semicon), and it amends Decreto 10.615/2021, the instrument governing PADIS — the semiconductor tax-incentive program that has existed since Lei 11.484/2007. In effect, Brazil just merged two decades of ad hoc chip policy into a single administrative structure, right as the rest of the world races to onshore semiconductor capacity.
What the decree actually does
The decree creates a Conselho Gestor do Brasil Semicon, chaired by the Ministry of Development, Industry, Commerce and Services (MDIC), with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI), the Finance Ministry, BNDES and Finep as members; MCTI runs the executive secretariat, handling company certification and compliance. It sets the PADIS financial credit at up to 13.10% of a firm's minimum R&D investment, and it defines five axes for the program: tax simplification and relief; support for research and technology-transfer institutions; workforce training; access to private financing; and — notably — "simplification of import and export processes."
That last axis matters more than it sounds. Lei 14.968/2024 already did the harder deregulatory work: it added Import Tax and merchant-marine freight surcharge (AFRMM) exemptions, eliminated the requirement that subsidized inputs appear on a pre-approved government list, extended eligibility to software design and virtual-environment services rather than just physical fabrication, and switched the financial-credit calculation to a company's total revenue instead of domestic sales alone. Decreto 13.065 operationalizes those changes and extends the underlying tax incentives from 2026 through 2029.
The case for treating this as industrial policy, fairly stated
The steelman for Brasil Semicon is real. Semiconductors are the substrate for AI, defense electronics, automotive systems and grid hardware — a fact the US, EU, India, Japan and South Korea have all acted on with their own subsidy regimes. Brazil imports the overwhelming majority of the chips it consumes: domestic production covers roughly 8% of national demand, mostly basic memory components, and the country's most advanced fabrication node sits at 65 nanometers, a generation leading manufacturers abandoned more than 15 years ago, according to Brazilian Institute for Digital Sovereignty (IBSD) estimates reported by the Rio Times in February 2026. A country that manufactures almost none of a foundational input is exposed to supply shocks it cannot control — the 2020–2022 chip shortage made that concrete for automakers worldwide, Brazil's included. Consolidating a fragmented, 19-year-old tax program into one governance structure with clearer eligibility rules is a defensible response to that exposure, not empire-building.
Why the deregulatory axis is the right bet, and the subsidy axis is the risk to watch
Where this program earns credit is in what it removes rather than what it hands out. Dropping the pre-approved input list, extending eligibility to software and design services, and naming customs and export-process simplification as a core programmatic axis are all reductions in friction — the kind of change that lowers costs for every firm in the chain rather than picking a handful of subsidized winners. At roughly $4.3 billion a year in chip imports covering 92% of demand, Brazil has no realistic path to a leading-edge fab: a single advanced facility costs $2–10 billion, a bet Brazil cannot place against competitors decades ahead on process technology. Spending the next few years making it cheaper and faster to import inputs and export finished components — while backing trailing-edge and niche design work for automotive, aerospace, energy and agribusiness applications — is a more honest strategy than chasing sovereignty theater at a node nobody else uses anymore.
The risk sits in the credit mechanism itself. Congress's own conduct here is the tell: the bill that became Lei 14.968/2024 originally included a provision to auto-renew incentives all the way to 2073, and Lula vetoed it specifically because it conflicted with the 2024 Budget Guidelines Law's five-year cap on tax benefits. That a legislature would even attempt a 49-year automatic subsidy extension is a warning sign about how PADIS-style credits behave once entrenched — they tend to calcify into permanent transfers rather than time-limited catalysts. Congress can still override that veto, and whoever administers the 13.10% credit cap through the new Conselho Gestor will face steady pressure to loosen it further.
The proportionate read
People of Internet's baseline is that governments should remove friction before they hand out money, and prefer sunset clauses over permanent subsidy regimes. Decreto 13.065 gets the first half right — the import/export simplification axis and the removal of pre-approval bureaucracy are genuine wins that will help firms regardless of whether Brazil ever fabs an advanced chip. It only gets the second half right if the five-year sunset holds and the 13.10% ceiling doesn't quietly become a floor. Given the veto fight over 2073, that is worth tracking, not assuming.