Latin America may not be the first place that springs to mind when discussing AI, however the region is driving innovation of this technology forward. While the U.S. and China lead when it comes to the creation of AI models and applications such as the now-infamous apps ChatGPT and DeepSeek, the next phase of growth is expected to be reliant on public-private partnerships.
On this front, Latin America is set to play a role in AI’s leap forward for a number of reasons. For one, governments in the region have largely taken a positive stance in relation to AI. As a result, the public sector is actually driving adoption.
In fact, Chile, Brazil and Uruguay are already using government strategies at the national level to consolidate and expand AI technologies.
Further, this top-level approach is viewed by many experts as the most effective way to ensure that AI initiatives work for the public good and address key societal needs that in turn act as enablers for rapid adoption.
Moreover, Latin America is an important near-shoring partner for tech companies and corporations in the U.S. and Canada thanks to the cost-competitive labour markets with deep talent pools.
For example, the average computer science salary in Costa Rica and Ecuador is around $38,000 and $39,000 respectively, while Mexico and Brazil alone contribute a staggering annual output of 605,000 software engineers.
While initial AI applications centered on the manufacturing industries, the rise of GenAI is set to have a tremendous impact on the productivity of tertiary service sectors. As a result, LatAm’s dominance as a near-shoring partner gives the region a $100 billion opportunity if it leverages AI in its knowledge-based services exports over the next decade, according to J.P Morgan.
This week, the next phase of the AI revolution is taking center stage as the global developer community heads to Nvidia’s annual AI conference, GTC, taking place March 17 – 21 in San Jose, California.
The next chapter of AI
Nvidia’s position as a driving force for machine learning and AI shows no signs of slowing. Although the launch of DeepSeek’s cost-effective GenAI model rocked markets temporarily, Nvidia reported a record-breaking quarter in February 2025, notching $39.3 billion in revenue.
Further, the company still commands an estimated 82% of the GPU market.
As thousands of startup founders, app creators, enterprise executives, and investors head to San Jose, California for its annual conference, it’s expected that the hundreds of sessions over the week will point the direction forward for the year ahead.
The tech giant typically uses the annual conference as a place to showcase research breakthroughs and launch new products to a captive audience, and 2025 is expected to follow a similar pattern.
Experts predict this year’s conference will drive important conversations on emerging applications like AI agents and the next-generation GPUs such as the NVIDIA Blackwell GPU that brings a petaflop of AI power onto a single super chip to create tiny supercomputers capable of complex tasks.
Despite Nvidia’s leading role in the future of AI, it’s also important to note the huge contributions that the tech community will make at the event including breakthroughs from Latin America.
Powering real-world uses of AI in Latin America
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote address will be live-streamed globally during the conference and is usually a highlight of the annual conference. While we don’t yet know the content of his keynote, it has been reported that Huang is impatient to see AI applications that matter beyond the tech industry.
Here, we know that Latin American markets are key enablers to such adoption.
This potential will be highlighted during a session between Tim Weisel, a Partner and AI Lead at Deloitte Brazil, and Otavio Cirbelli, General Manager for Upstream Applications at Petrobras.
The talk, titled Domain-Adapted LLM for Offshore Integrity and Reliability, will showcase the potential of GenAI for industrial use cases where reliability and security are key by detailing how Petrobas transformed a 30-year-old knowledge dataset into a “game-changing” AI assistant for offshore and onshore operations.
Meanwhile, one tech company in particular has been showcasing the benefits of leveraging Nvidia’s GPU tech to supercharge big data projects.
Tech enterprise SQream has been collaborating with the tech giant for over a decade, helping businesses accelerate data analytics at an unprecedented scale, processing petabyte-scale datasets significantly faster than traditional CPU-based solutions, and performing complex queries at a fraction of the cost. The latest integration with NVIDIA RAPIDS builds on its foundation and supports enhanced GPU efficiency and streamlined workflows through a unified data platform.
This follows on from a strategic move in 2024 that saw data cloud company Snowflake, a partner of SQream, open its first office in Colombia. Access to data acceleration platforms and local presence across more Latin American countries will be key to unlocking more value from the tertiary service sector.
Rising AI startups in Latin America
While supportive legislation and interest from public and private sectors are driving AI adoption in Latin America, homegrown startups also have an opportunity to shine.
Here, local innovators can spot niche opportunities and address pressing community challenges with the power of AI.
Incubators and accelerators like Pygma are helping grow local AI startups by providing funding, facilities and mentoring across borders, with a 12-week acceleration program that delivers the support, knowledge and community early-stage founders need to scale their tech companies in Latin America.
Meanwhile, the Oxigenio Acelerador in Brazil has helped rising startups like Melivia get off the ground. Founded in 2020, Meliva offers an AI-powered content creation platform intended to streamline content production with huge potential for the burgeoning design services industry.
Another example can be found with Nutri Co, a Peruvian foodtech harnessing AI to improve diets and nutrition in Latin America.
Latin America is a leader when it comes to actually implementing AI technology in useful ways, supported by positive legislation, broad interest from both public and private sectors, and its role as the nearshoring partner for North American businesses.
As the next wave of AI is expected to focus on taking the technology outside of the tech sector, and public-private partnerships increasingly matter, the region could have a critical role to play.
