While T&T bat­tles crime with yet an­oth­er State of Emer­gency, the de­vel­oped world is rac­ing ahead at light speed to build fu­tur­is­tic in­fra­struc­ture that blurs the lines be­tween sci­ence fic­tion and re­al­i­ty. I sin­cere­ly hope T&T elim­i­nates its de­vel­op­men­tal chal­lenges be­fore it is left far be­hind by the chang­ing glob­al land­scape.

Mark Zucker­berg an­nounced a pro­posed new da­ta cen­tre, Hy­pe­r­i­on, named af­ter the Greek ti­tan whose name means “he who walks on high.” The da­ta cen­tre will be lo­cat­ed in Louisiana and cov­er an area the size of Man­hat­tan. Zucker­berg’s Meta aims to scale out the da­ta cen­tre to a ca­pac­i­ty of five gi­gawatts of pow­er. By com­par­i­son, T&T has 2.13 gi­gawatts of pow­er gen­er­a­tion ca­pac­i­ty.

The da­ta cen­tre is es­ti­mat­ed to cost US$10 bil­lion, which is more than the na­tion­al bud­get of T&T in a fis­cal year. These com­par­isons are giv­en to help read­ers un­der­stand the scale of in­vest­ment in AI in­fra­struc­ture, as tril­lion-dol­lar com­pa­nies are rac­ing to out­com­pete one an­oth­er to claim dom­i­nance in this new field of tech­nol­o­gy.

An ar­ti­cle by in­ter­na­tion­al law firm Vin­son & Elkins dis­cussed the mas­sive pow­er con­sump­tion of new AI da­ta cen­tres as fol­lows:

“AI da­ta cen­tres con­sume eight times the pow­er of non-AI-pow­ered da­ta cen­tres. And while mod­ern da­ta cen­tres have be­come more ef­fi­cient, the rate of pow­er ef­fi­cien­cy gains is de­cel­er­at­ing. Ris­ing con­sump­tion will dri­ve sig­nif­i­cant cost in­creas­es, stem­ming from de­mand growth for pow­er as a com­mod­i­ty and from de­mand for the elec­tric grid to de­liv­er pow­er to da­ta cen­tres.

In 2022, da­ta cen­tres ac­count­ed for about 2.5 per cent of U.S. elec­tric de­mand. By 2030, that fig­ure could rise to 20 per cent, with AI da­ta cen­tres ac­count­ing for three-quar­ters of the de­mand. If fore­casts hold, this growth will come along­side sky­rock­et­ing de­mand for new trans­mis­sion fa­cil­i­ties, as the elec­tric grid faces grow­ing de­mand and chang­ing needs from ro­bust U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ing, elec­tric ve­hi­cle charg­ing, and the shift­ing gen­er­a­tion mix, among oth­er strains.“

Most AI da­ta cen­tres are pow­ered by nat­ur­al gas, which is good news for T&T in the short term, since de­mand for nat­ur­al gas will re­main high and keep in­ter­na­tion­al oil com­pa­nies drilling for gas in T&T. In the long term, how­ev­er, T&T will in­evitably run out of oil, gas and fos­sil fu­els and have to piv­ot to new in­dus­tries to sur­vive.

Gov­er­nance & the dig­i­tal econ­o­my

As I high­light­ed in a pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle, soft­ware in­dus­tries such as video games have com­bined in­dus­try rev­enues as high as US$522.46 bil­lion. Soft­ware so­lu­tions are a US$700 bil­lion mar­ket that will reach over 1 tril­lion by 2030.

T&T has a high­ly de­vel­oped telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions in­dus­try with high-speed 4G and 5G mo­bile net­works and fi­bre op­tic con­nec­tions avail­able across much of the coun­try. Da­ta from the US In­ter­na­tion­al Trade Ad­min­is­tra­tion states as fol­lows:

“ICT ac­counts for 3.7 per cent of GDP, pri­mar­i­ly in soft­ware de­vel­op­ment, web de­sign, da­ta pro­cess­ing, ICT train­ing, and soft­ware so­lu­tions. With 142 mo­bile phone sub­scrip­tions per 100 peo­ple, T&T has one of the high­est pen­e­tra­tions of mo­bile phone cov­er­age in the world. At the start of 2023, 79 per cent of the to­tal pop­u­la­tion had in­ter­net sub­scrip­tions.”

Thanks to the com­pet­i­tive mar­ket be­tween telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies, T&T has de­cent in­fra­struc­ture that can be the ba­sis of pro­vid­ing ICT ser­vices to lo­cal and for­eign mar­kets. The Gov­ern­ment of T&T would ben­e­fit from stor­ing most of its da­ta in servers on T&T soil to pre­vent pro­pri­etary in­for­ma­tion from be­ing sub­ject to the laws of for­eign gov­ern­ments and the poli­cies of tech gi­ants who have shown their will­ing­ness to sac­ri­fice user pri­va­cy for prof­it.

T&T ur­gent­ly needs a com­pre­hen­sive da­ta sov­er­eign­ty and da­ta pri­va­cy frame­work to pro­tect our cit­i­zens’ pri­va­cy and en­cour­age lo­cal soft­ware de­vel­op­ers to cre­ate so­lu­tions that op­er­ate with­in our lo­cal frame­work.

In­evitably, T&T will need to up­date its da­ta pro­tec­tion and cy­ber­crime laws and, in a few years, pass AI leg­is­la­tion based on best prac­tice that is on­ly now emerg­ing out of the Eu­ro­pean Union and the Unit­ed States.

Hope­ful­ly, once a good reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work is es­tab­lished, the Gov­ern­ment of T&T can at­tract in­vest­ments from tril­lion-dol­lar tech com­pa­nies like Nvidia, Mi­crosoft and Google, which will bring in much-need­ed for­eign ex­change and di­ver­si­fy our econ­o­my away from a de­pen­dence on oil and gas.

Just as the last few decades were marked by the so­cial changes and eco­nom­ic growth brought by the adop­tion of the In­ter­net, the fu­ture will be marked by AI adop­tion.

Hope­ful­ly, af­ter this State of Emer­gency is re­solved, Par­lia­ment can fo­cus on push­ing T&T in­to the fu­ture in­stead of fight­ing the same bat­tle with crim­i­nal gangs. When T&T’s crime rate reached 386 mur­ders per an­num in 2005, Nvidia was on­ly worth US$6 bil­lion. To­day, Nvidia is worth US$4 tril­lion due to its suc­cess in pi­o­neer­ing the hard­ware side of the AI rev­o­lu­tion. The need to spend re­sources and leg­isla­tive time on the crime cri­sis is hold­ing T&T back from catch­ing up with the de­vel­oped world.