Stephon Nicholas

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

Al­most a decade af­ter plans were un­veiled for a da­ta cen­tre in To­ba­go, the project has been un­plugged.

The ini­tia­tive was an­nounced in 2017 as a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the Eco-In­dus­tri­al De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny of To­ba­go (EI­D­COT) and the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T (TSTT) to en­hance the in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) ser­vices on the is­land.

The tier III da­ta cen­tre was ear­marked for the Cove Es­tate and ex­pect­ed to pro­vide 99.98 re­li­a­bil­i­ty ser­vice with da­ta stor­age and oth­er IT ser­vices of­fered to busi­ness­es for a fee. A joint ven­ture com­pa­ny, NUK­LYUS, was tasked with ex­e­cut­ing the project.

As the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly con­ducts a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion—one of the pil­lars of Fi­nance Sec­re­tary Petal Ann-Roberts’ 2027 bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion— da­ta stor­age and se­cu­ri­ty re­main an area of con­cern.

TSTT did not re­spond to ques­tions from Guardian Me­dia about why the da­ta cen­tre was not built or if it still in­tends to con­tin­ue with the project.

One stake­hold­er be­lieves To­ba­go will need a da­ta cen­tre in the near fu­ture to keep up with the dig­i­tal de­mands.

Lar­ry Richards, man­ag­er of op­er­a­tions, EI­D­COT, speak­ing in an in­di­vid­ual ca­pac­i­ty as a lead­er­ship man­age­ment con­sul­tant, said a lo­cal da­ta cen­tre would be a pos­i­tive.

He said, “If you are on a premise and there is a fire, if your serv­er is on the premise then it could be de­stroyed. At a da­ta cen­tre it is stored se­cure­ly and ef­fi­cient­ly for you in a way that can eas­i­ly be ac­cessed.”

He said this ser­vice pro­vides con­ti­nu­ity, se­cu­ri­ty and val­ue for com­pa­nies.

“In any or­gan­i­sa­tion, in any so­ci­ety, it is a good way to store your busi­ness, your busi­ness valu­ables, whether in terms of in­fo and so on, be­cause we can ac­tu­al­ly cre­ate val­ue from that in­for­ma­tion that is be­ing stored.”

He said busi­ness­es of­ten out­grow their spaces so it was best prac­tice to have in­for­ma­tion off-site.

Richards not­ed the dif­fer­ence be­tween a da­ta cen­tre and an ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) da­ta cen­tre. The gov­ern­ment has signed a mem­o­ran­dum of un­der­stand­ing for US-backed AI da­ta cen­tres to be built in Trinidad.

Richards said, “A reg­u­lar da­ta cen­tre just means you are stor­ing in­for­ma­tion there.

“For AI da­ta cen­tres, this is where the AI mod­els are stored, like the graph­ics pro­cess­ing units (GPUs), all the stuff for the pro­cess­ing of the in­for­ma­tion. It is the in­fra­struc­ture of the AI. When you turn the phone on and click on the (AI) ap­pli­ca­tion, you are ac­tu­al­ly con­nect­ing to the da­ta cen­tre.”

To­ba­go busi­ness­es must em­brace AI

Richard said the pub­lic must un­der­stand the tech­nol­o­gy to be able to use it ef­fec­tive­ly.

“What AI tries to do is repli­cate how hu­man be­ings think and make de­ci­sions. There are eight to nine di­men­sions to what hu­man in­tel­li­gence is. AI right now can on­ly repli­cate two of them.

“What we see as AI is a big ma­chine do­ing sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis and pre­dict­ing the next text. It has come so far that it has be­come re­li­able, but as hu­man be­ings we have to dif­fer­en­ti­ate whether this makes sense or not.”

He be­lieves the tech­nol­o­gy should be em­braced as it pro­vides an av­enue for small- and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es to bridge the fi­nan­cial gap and im­prove their struc­ture, mar­ket­ing and ef­fi­cien­cy.

“We can run sim­u­la­tions on these mod­els and come up with cre­ative ways of how we can im­prove your busi­ness­es. Where we have lim­i­ta­tions with re­sources we can sup­ple­ment them us­ing these tech­nolo­gies. It has nar­rowed the gap on the haves and have nots.”