Would Trinidad and To­ba­go be bet­ter off hav­ing a da­ta cen­tre or not hav­ing one?

I think that T&T will be bet­ter off hav­ing one, rather than by­pass­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty al­to­geth­er.

There are a lot of prob­lems with da­ta cen­tres. The con­tro­ver­sy that sur­rounds their es­tab­lish­ment in var­i­ous coun­tries makes that clear. But you can’t have dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion and AI-dri­ven in­fra­struc­ture with­out da­ta cen­tres. And AI-dri­ven dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion will pro­ceed apace and da­ta cen­tres will have to be built. Com­plete avoid­ance of in­vest­ment in a da­ta cen­tre will mean miss­ing out on the foun­da­tion­al in­fra­struc­ture of the dig­i­tal econ­o­my.

Why do we have a Min­istry of AI, if not to ad­vance our econ­o­my and so­ci­ety to dig­i­tal ef­fi­cien­cy and com­pe­tence and to more ef­fec­tive­ly en­gage a glob­al dig­i­tal econ­o­my and val­ue chain? Why would we want to op­pose the foun­da­tion­al in­fra­struc­ture of the dig­i­tal econ­o­my if we see val­ue in dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion? Es­pe­cial­ly as we are col­lab­o­rat­ing with In­dia on the roll-out of the Dig­i­tal stack.

There are good rea­sons to ques­tion, to chal­lenge and to de­mand an­swers, though. But no re­al rea­son to op­pose un­less the prob­lems that da­ta cen­tres pose and cre­ate are not ac­knowl­edged and ad­dressed trans­par­ent­ly by the Gov­ern­ment.

The thing that made the San­dals in­vest­ment col­lapse is not the project it­self or any of the prob­lems it might have pre­sent­ed, nor even the ques­tions in

peo­ple’s minds. The thing that killed it was the lack of trans­paren­cy, about a se­cret MoU, about pro­cure­ment and the ex­tent of pub­lic (ie tax­pay­er) fi­nanc­ing, lack of clar­i­ty about own­er­ship, man­age­ment and re­turns and a lack of clear an­swers on en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact.

The Gov­ern­ment must be trans­par­ent on the so­lu­tion to elec­tric­i­ty and wa­ter de­mand and its im­pli­ca­tions; on the en­vi­ron­men­tal con­cerns and on the bona fides of the in­vestor or in­vestors; and un­equiv­o­cal about Gov­ern­ment’s in­volve­ment and the is­sue of tax­pay­er mon­ey.

If these hur­dles are over­come, then the ben­e­fits of the project can be out­lined and dis­cussed.

But if the Gov­ern­ment pro­ceeds to strate­gi­cal­ly and con­sci­en­tious­ly es­tab­lish a da­ta cen­tre, and us­es a tar­get­ed roadmap tak­ing in­to ac­count con­straints and at­ten­dant prob­lems, then by tak­ing a cal­cu­lat­ed niche ap­proach, our coun­try will be able to max­imise eco­nom­ic val­ue, while, at the same time, it can take steps to strict­ly mit­i­gate en­vi­ron­men­tal risks.

Why do I take the view that we should lever­age the op­por­tu­ni­ty, mit­i­gate the risks, take a cal­cu­lat­ed niche ap­proach and make it hap­pen? Be­cause da­ta cen­tres are the bedrock of dig­i­tal sov­er­eign­ty, cloud com­put­ing and eco­nom­ic mod­erni­sa­tion.

And it would be a mis­take to miss out.

Not hav­ing our own da­ta cen­tre will mean for this coun­try, con­tin­ued re­liance on for­eign Cloud in­fra­struc­ture (US), out­bound fi­nan­cial costs and slow­er da­ta pro­cess­ing. The sig­nif­i­cance of this is that our tech ecosys­tem will be sti­fled. But if T&T has its own da­ta cen­tre, lo­cal fin­tech will thrive, gov­ern­ment dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion ef­forts should ac­cel­er­ate and AI start-ups will have a bet­ter chance of suc­cess. Be­cause our da­ta la­ten­cy (slow da­ta) is­sues would have been solved, a da­ta host­ing busi­ness can be de­vel­oped here.

Ex­cept for the con­struc­tion phase, a da­ta cen­tre will cre­ate few jobs but where it will cre­ate val­ue is in da­ta sov­er­eign­ty and eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion high­er up the val­ue chain. With da­ta cen­tre ca­pac­i­ty, we can host crit­i­cal re­gion­al, fi­nan­cial, gov­ern­men­tal and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions da­ta. And, in this way, T&T can be­come a se­cure, re­dun­dant da­ta hub for the wider Caribbean re­gion.

One thing a da­ta cen­tre can do is to an­chor a broad ecosys­tem of cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty, net­work en­gi­neer­ing and cloud man­age­ment pro­fes­sion­als. In a big coun­try, that would not be a big deal but in a coun­try such as ours, it would mean new high-skilled ser­vice busi­ness­es and new in­dus­tries.

A well-thought-out, sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment strat­e­gy for T&T re­quires ze­ro drain of ex­ist­ing na­tion­al re­sources from our cit­i­zens. It al­so re­quires a closed-loop mod­el which binds the in­vestor to cer­tain things. For ex­am­ple, the com­pa­ny must gen­er­ate its own re­new­able pow­er. This is not on­ly about elec­tric­i­ty but about nat­ur­al gas as well. The da­ta cen­tre must con­sume ze­ro do­mes­tic wa­ter. The com­pa­ny must agree to ful­ly re­ha­bil­i­tate the site af­ter a 15-year run.

Re­mem­ber, a da­ta cen­tre will cre­ate just a few di­rect jobs. So, our prin­ci­pal gains from the da­ta cen­tre will be lever­ag­ing com­put­er pow­er to digi­tise our T&T econ­o­my. And di­ver­si­fy­ing in­to tech ser­vices for re­gion­al and wider ex­port.

So, let’s not just be smart about it but wise as well.