Government pushes back against AI data centres ‘naysayers’

The Gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to push back against grow­ing crit­i­cism over its pro­posed ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence da­ta cen­tres, with Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing Min­is­ter Pro­fes­sor Prakash Per­sad ac­cus­ing op­po­nents of be­ing “naysay­ers” who com­plain re­gard­less of the out­come, while Pe­nal/Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion Chair­man Gow­tam Ma­haraj sought to re­as­sure the pub­lic that any risks as­so­ci­at­ed with the project would be prop­er­ly man­aged.

The com­ments come amid in­creas­ing pub­lic de­bate fol­low­ing last week’s sign­ing of three Mem­o­ran­da of Un­der­stand­ing (MOUs) be­tween the Gov­ern­ment and Unit­ed States or­gan­i­sa­tions.

Two of the agree­ments seek to es­tab­lish large-scale ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence in­fra­struc­ture and da­ta cen­tres in Trinidad and To­ba­go, while a third fo­cus­es on restart­ing steel pro­duc­tion at Point Lisas us­ing strate­gic met­als.

Un­der one MOU, Ernst & Young LLP in­tends to part­ner with third par­ties to de­vel­op a 300-megawatt da­ta cen­tre, while a sec­ond agree­ment with Hum­ming­bird AI Hold­ings LLC pro­pos­es a 150-megawatt AI in­fra­struc­ture and da­ta cen­tre, with the po­ten­tial to ex­pand to 500 megawatts.

Ini­tial com­mer­cial op­er­a­tions are tar­get­ed for the first quar­ter of 2028, sub­ject to due dili­gence, reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals and fur­ther ne­go­ti­a­tions.

The projects have prompt­ed con­cern from some mem­bers of the pub­lic and en­vi­ron­men­tal ad­vo­cates over their po­ten­tial im­pact on wa­ter re­sources, en­er­gy de­mand and sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties.

A pe­ti­tion has al­so be­gun cir­cu­lat­ing on­line call­ing for Gov­ern­ment to sus­pend ap­provals pend­ing fur­ther re­view.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions from re­porters yes­ter­day fol­low­ing the launch of ICT short cours­es at the MIC-IT cam­pus in Clarke Road, Pe­nal, Per­sad dis­missed sug­ges­tions that there was cause for alarm, say­ing many of the con­cerns were pre­ma­ture.

“Well, first­ly, as you said, noth­ing has been de­fined as that. So I think maybe some of these is­sues are a bit pre­ma­ture.”

The Min­is­ter then took aim at crit­ics ques­tion­ing the project.

“They’re al­ways the naysay­ers. They’ll com­plain there are no jobs, and if you do some­thing that cre­ates jobs, they’ll com­plain about that al­so.”

Per­sad ar­gued that the pro­posed fa­cil­i­ties could de­liv­er sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits.

He added that the projects could al­so gen­er­ate for­eign ex­change.

Ad­dress­ing en­vi­ron­men­tal con­cerns, Per­sad stressed that no project would pro­ceed with­out com­ply­ing with all statu­to­ry re­quire­ments.

“Be­fore you do any large con­struc­tion project, you need to get the en­vi­ron­ment re­claimed. You need to get the CEC cer­tifi­cate. So that is go­ing to hap­pen.”

He main­tained that the coun­try’s reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work would en­sure the projects are prop­er­ly scru­ti­nised.

Asked about the pe­ti­tion call­ing for ap­provals to be sus­pend­ed, Per­sad de­clined to com­ment fur­ther.

“I think the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties ad­dressed that con­cern ad­e­quate­ly.”

His re­marks fol­low as­sur­ances from Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath over the week­end that the pro­posed AI da­ta cen­tres would be de­vel­oped with­in a Spe­cial Eco­nom­ic Zone in Debe, with short-, medi­um- and long-term plans al­ready in place to meet their wa­ter re­quire­ments.

Padarath said the Gov­ern­ment in­tends to con­struct man-made ponds with­in the eco­nom­ic zone to sat­is­fy the projects’ ini­tial wa­ter de­mand be­fore tran­si­tion­ing to pro­posed de­sali­na­tion plants in Moru­ga/Table­land and Ma­yaro.

He main­tained that the de­vel­op­ments will not af­fect wa­ter sup­plies to res­i­den­tial or com­mer­cial cus­tomers, say­ing mul­ti­ple min­istries have been co­or­di­nat­ing the ini­tia­tive from the out­set.

Mean­while, Ma­haraj al­so wel­comed the pro­posed in­vest­ment, say­ing South Trinidad stands to ben­e­fit from much-need­ed em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties.

“We are very ex­cit­ed. Any ac­tiv­i­ty that brings jobs to our peo­ple, we are very, very much ap­pre­cia­tive and in ac­cep­tance of it be­cause re­gions here and neigh­bour­ing re­gions, peo­ple are in need of jobs.”

Re­spond­ing to con­cerns over the safe­ty of the pro­posed fa­cil­i­ties, Ma­haraj said the ob­jec­tive of mod­ern in­dus­try is to man­age risk, not elim­i­nate it en­tire­ly.

He ex­pressed con­fi­dence that the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties would en­sure the nec­es­sary safe­guards are im­ple­ment­ed be­fore any con­struc­tion be­gins.

A da­ta cen­tre is a cen­tralised phys­i­cal fa­cil­i­ty that hous­es thou­sands of net­worked com­put­ers, servers, and da­ta stor­age sys­tems.

Ac­cord­ing to the In­ter­na­tion­al En­er­gy Agency, it acts as the back­bone of the in­ter­net, stor­ing and pro­cess­ing the dig­i­tal in­for­ma­tion re­quired for cloud com­put­ing, video stream­ing, and mod­ern dig­i­tal ap­pli­ca­tions. Da­ta cen­tres con­sume im­mense amounts of pow­er pri­mar­i­ly due to high-den­si­ty com­put­ing hard­ware (like AI-fo­cused GPUs) and the mas­sive cool­ing in­fra­struc­ture re­quired to pre­vent them from over­heat­ing.

High-den­si­ty com­put­er chips gen­er­ate in­tense heat. To main­tain op­ti­mal per­for­mance and pre­vent equip­ment fail­ure, fa­cil­i­ties re­quire mas­sive, con­tin­u­ous cool­ing sys­tems. Cool­ing can ac­count for up to half of a da­ta cen­tre’s to­tal en­er­gy use.