KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

The Op­po­si­tion says it sup­ports dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and the de­vel­op­ment of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI), but is call­ing on the Gov­ern­ment to hit pause on its pro­posed AI da­ta cen­tres un­til they can pro­vide more in­for­ma­tion to the pub­lic.

Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) MP Do­minic Ro­main says the par­ty is not op­posed to the project it­self, but be­lieves a de­vel­op­ment of this scale should on­ly pro­ceed af­ter mean­ing­ful pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion, greater trans­paren­cy and suf­fi­cient due dili­gence.

Dur­ing an Op­po­si­tion me­dia brief­ing last Thurs­day, Mal­abar/Mau­si­ca MP Ro­main crit­i­cised Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar for dis­miss­ing pub­lic con­cerns over the project, claim­ing they were of lit­tle con­cern.

He al­so ar­gued that Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath has spo­ken as though the project is al­ready a done deal, de­spite con­tin­ued calls for con­sul­ta­tion.

“When we lis­ten to the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties, his ut­ter­ances ba­si­cal­ly give you the im­pres­sion that this is a done deal. They’ve iden­ti­fied the site, the ar­eas where these da­ta cen­tres will be lo­cat­ed. They’ve iden­ti­fied the mech­a­nisms by where the wa­ter will be pro­vid­ed, the mech­a­nisms by where the elec­tric­i­ty will be pro­vid­ed, so while we are call­ing for con­sul­ta­tion, it ap­pears that this is a done deal.”

Ro­main said the Gov­ern­ment should pub­lish en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact, en­er­gy and wa­ter avail­abil­i­ty as­sess­ments be­fore mov­ing ahead with the project.

He al­so ques­tioned whether any mem­ber of Gov­ern­ment has di­rect or in­di­rect per­son­al or pro­fes­sion­al links to en­ti­ties in­volved in the mem­o­ran­da of un­der­stand­ing.

The par­ty is al­so seek­ing an­swers on why hum­ming­bird AI chose Debe as its pro­posed site, whether de­sali­na­tion will be used to meet the project’s wa­ter de­mand, and whether the com­pa­ny will re­ceive any tax con­ces­sions or oth­er in­cen­tives. 

Sim­i­lar­ly, for­mer pub­lic util­i­ties min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les al­so ques­tioned how the project would af­fect the coun­try’s wa­ter sup­ply which he de­scribed as al­ready strained, and asked how the de­mands of a large AI da­ta cen­tre would be met while many com­mu­ni­ties con­tin­ue to ex­pe­ri­ence wa­ter short­ages and elec­tric­i­ty out­ages.

Gon­za­les said, “I want to ask the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties to stop the lack of per­for­mance, get down to un­der­stand­ing his job and to ad­vise the gov­ern­ment prop­er­ly with re­spect to whether or not Trinidad and To­ba­go, as we stand at this point in time, from a wa­ter per­spec­tive and an elec­tric­i­ty per­spec­tive, that can ac­com­mo­date or sup­port the es­tab­lish­ment of AI da­ta cen­tres.”