Brazil declared intentions to disconnect itself from the US-controlled Internet last year due to privacy concerns and it appears they weren't kidding. The country is preparing to spend $185 million on a fiber optic cable that'll stretch roughly 3,500 miles from the city of Fortaleza in Brazil across the Atlantic Ocean to Portugal.

The project, headed up by state-owned telecom Telebras, won't rely on help from any US companies.

Brazil wasn't exactly thrilled when it learned last year that the NSA had been spying on them for years. Telebras president Francisco Ziober Filho told Bloomberg that the issue of data integrity and vulnerability is always a concern for any telecom company but the NSA revelations prompted them to step up their audits to check for security vulnerabilities in foreign-made equipment.

Brazil aside, the bigger story here is how the NSA revelations are having an impact on the economics of US-based technology companies. More often than not, it's more expensive and complex to replace existing infrastructure but those planning new projects still have time to look to non-US companies.

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation believes US companies could miss out on as much as $35 billion in revenue through 2016 over the matter.

The obvious financial winners here are the non-US technology companies that may have otherwise been overlooked for contract work.