BRICS is an international organization currently comprising ten countries: Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

Its conceptual origins were articulated by Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov in 1998, and can be traced to informal forums and dialogue groups such as RIC (Russia, India, and China) and IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa). BRIC was originally a term coined by British economist Jim O'Neill, and later championed by his employer Goldman Sachs in 2001, to designate a group of emerging markets.

The bloc's inaugural summit was held in 2009 and featured the founding countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China; they adopted the acronym BRIC and formed an informal diplomatic group where their governments could meet annually at formal summits and coordinate multilateral policies. South Africa joined the organization in September 2010, which was then renamed BRICS, and attended the third summit in 2011 as a full member. Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates attended their first summit as member states in 2024 in Russia.

Indonesia officially joined in early 2025, becoming the first Southeast Asian member. Saudi Arabia was invited at the Johannesburg summit and it is considered part of the organisation, but has not publicly confirmed its membership. The term BRICS+ has been informally used to reflect new membership since 2024.

Collective action in the political arena in the late 1990s was present before the economic rationale of BRICS. The idea of a multipolar group like BRICS can be traced back to Yevgeny Primakov during his term as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia. He reiterated the idea in New Delhi in 1998. The forums RIC (Russia, India, China) and IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) predated and played an important role in the creation of BRIC and subsequently BRICS.

The term BRIC, as compared to the alternate term CRIB, was originally developed in the context of foreign investment strategies. It was introduced in the 2001 publication, Building Better Global Economic BRICs by Jim O'Neill, then head of global economics research at Goldman Sachs and later Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. O'Neill now regards the BRICS group as a failed project.

In a 2021 article for Project Syndicate he wrote that the BRICS countries "have so far proven incapable of uniting as a meaningful global force" and felt in 2024 that "each year also brings further confirmation that the grouping serves no real purpose beyond generating symbolic gestures and lofty rhetoric".

The foreign ministers of the initial four BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) met in New York City in September 2006 at the margins of the General Debate of the UN Assembly, beginning a series of high-level meetings. A full-scale diplomatic meeting was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on 16 June 2009.

In 2010, South Africa began efforts to join BRIC, and the process for its formal admission began in August of that year. South Africa officially became a member nation on 24 December 2010 after being formally invited by China, and was subsequently accepted by other BRIC countries. The group was renamed BRICS to represent the addition of South Africa to the original four BRIC members. At the third BRICS summit in 2011 in Sanya, China, South African president Jacob Zuma represented the country as a full member for the first time.

In June 2012, the BRICS nations pledged $75 billion to boost the lending power of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, the proposed loan was conditional on IMF voting reforms. In March 2013, during the fifth BRICS summit in Durban, the member countries agreed to create a global financial institution to cooperate with the western-dominated IMF and World Bank. They planned to set up this New Development Bank (known at the time as the "BRICS Development Bank") by 2014.

At the BRICS leaders meeting in Saint Petersburg in September 2013, China committed $41 billion towards the pool; Brazil, India, and Russia committed $18 billion each; and South Africa committed $5 billion. China, which held the world's largest foreign exchange reserves and contributed the bulk of the currency pool, wanted a more significant managing role. China also wanted to be the location of the reserve. In October 2013, Russia's Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that creating a $100 billion in funds designated to steady currency markets would be taken in early 2014.

The Brazilian finance minister, Guido Mantega, confirmed that the fund would be created by March 2014. However, by April 2014, the currency reserve pool and development bank had yet to be set up, and the date was rescheduled to 2015.

In July 2014, during the sixth BRICS summit in Fortaleza, the BRICS members signed a document to create the US$100 billion New Development Bank and a reserve currency pool worth over another US$100 billion. Documents on cooperation between BRICS export credit agencies and an agreement of cooperation on innovation were also signed. The Fortaleza summit was followed by a BRICS meeting with the Union of South American Nations presidents in Brasília.

Since 2011, the National Institutes of Statistics of the BRICS group of countries (Institute of Geography and Statistics (Brazil), Federal State Statistics Service (Russia), the National Bureau of Statistics (China), the Central Statistics Office (India), and Statistics South Africa produce an annual joint statistical publication to put statistical production in perspective, compare adopted methodologies and statistical results. The publication serves as a single data platform for the mutual benefit of participating countries.

Since 2012, the BRICS group of countries has been planning an optical fiber submarine communications cable system to carry telecommunications between the BRICS countries, known as the BRICS Cable. Part of the motivation for the project was the spying of the U.S. National Security Agency on all telecommunications that flowed in and out of United States territory. Construction of the proposed cable network was abandoned in 2015, possibly due to cost.

In August 2019, the communications ministers of the BRICS countries signed a letter of intent to cooperate in the Information and Communication Technology sector. This agreement was signed in the fifth edition of the meeting of communication ministers of countries member of the group held in Brasília, Brazil.