This article examines the obstacles to and the prospects for deeper cooperation among the BRICS countries in the field of information technology. It argues that digital sovereignty is at once the main motive for such cooperation and its principal constraint. The study reviews the institutional architecture that BRICS has built since 2017, including the Partnership on the New Industrial Revolution, the Digital BRICS Task Force and the remote sensing satellite constellation, and then identifies five obstacles: structural heterogeneity, divergent data-governance regimes, technological dependence on Western suppliers, the rivalry between China and India, and weak institutionalization. It then assesses the most promising tracks for optimization, among them cross-border payment infrastructure, a shared data-governance framework, digital public infrastructure, sovereign artificial intelligence and space-based data. The article concludes that the prospects are real but uneven, and that progress depends less on technical capacity than on a governance design that preserves national control while allowing systems to interoperate.
