A hard but necessary conversation on the proposed data centre for Trinidad and Tobago.

“Trinidad and Tobago is being offered a data centre. The Government is calling it the foundation of an AI industry. Those are not the same thing – and the difference will define the next generation.”

In a previous article, I argued that AI will not save a business simply because it is using ChatGPT or teaching staff to write clever prompts. The advantage comes from the intelligent systems built around the tools: the data, workflows, people, decisions and customer experience they support and connect. That argument becomes more urgent when the conversation moves from a business to a country. Trinidad and Tobago is being invited to imagine itself as a potential AI hub. The question is not whether we should welcome that invitation. The question is whether we are designing the right vision and ecosystem around it or allowing someone else to dictate the default settings.

The Government’s recent MoU with Hummingbird AI Holdings LLC is therefore potentially significant, but only if it is done the right way. The investment framework concerns a proposed 150-megawatt AI infrastructure and data-centre facility, with possible longer-term expansion to 500 megawatts and a target for initial operation in the first quarter of 2028, subject to due diligence and the project proceeding. The Government describes this potential investment as a multi-billion-dollar initiative. That is a headline worth examining, not merely applauding. Recent reporting on the MoU underscores both its scale and its preliminary nature.

Let us be clear: a memorandum is not a completed investment; one data centre does not make an AI industry; and a foreign investor’s ambition is not a national strategy. Those distinctions are the difference between economic leadership and economic passivity—in other words, being sold to or buying what we decide on. A data centre can host computing power. It does not automatically create Trinbagonian AI entrepreneurs, engineers, Caribbean-language models, exportable software firms, local intellectual property or businesses solving regional or global problems. One data centre does not make an industry. This is not an argument against foreign investment. It is an argument for the terms on which it should be welcomed.

The real question is not whether AI is coming. It is who writes our story…

Tourism and oil have already taught us this lesson

The Caribbean should be especially wary of confusing a foreign-financed facility with broad national development. Tourism brought hotels, airlines and promises of employment. It created mostly low-paying jobs and generated foreign exchange. But too often, the higher-value layers—ownership, distribution, customer-data mining, branding, marketing, technology, supply chains and decision-making—remained elsewhere.

The World Bank’s 2025 assessment of Caribbean tourism acknowledges that cruise and all-inclusive models deliver jobs and foreign direct investment, but also finds that market power in those segments has created environmental and social risks and inhibited diversification. Its answer is not to reject tourism; it is to build higher-value offerings and stronger local supplier ecosystems. The CHTA President, Mr. Gregor Nassief, and Dr. Auliana Poon, a prominent global tourism expert, both argue for a Caribbean tourism industry that prioritises value over volume. And that is precisely the lesson for AI.

Oil and gas offer a second lesson. Natural resources did not automatically make Trinidad and Tobago diversified, technologically sovereign or broadly entrepreneurial. Value capture had to be fought for through local capability, institutional capacity, local-content disciplines and long-term planning. AI will be no different. If our contribution is limited to land, tax incentives, electricity, water and low-value services, while ownership, specialist talent, intellectual property, customer data, cloud revenues and export contracts reside elsewhere, then we will have repeated an old pattern in a new industry.

The most controversial thing to say may also be the most practical: Trinidad and Tobago should not approve AI infrastructure merely because it is large, fashionable or foreign. We should approve it because it meets a national vision that is more demanding than an investor’s business plan. Foreign capital can be welcome. However, foreign capital should not be allowed to write our AI economic development story.

Designing a strategic approach to AI—not adopting the default settings

Fortunately, Trinidad and Tobago is not starting from zero. The Ministry of Public Administration and Artificial Intelligence is undertaking a National AI Assessment with UNDP and UNESCO to examine readiness across infrastructure, talent, data, innovation, policy, regulation, ethics and social impact. That is serious foundational work. The national assessment and UNESCO’s readiness work are important foundations. But an assessment is not yet an industry vision or strategy. Its findings must become public, measurable conditions for investments of this scale, before infrastructure locks in a path by default.

What Trinidad and Tobago should require before this becomes an AI industry

This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is how a small state converts an investment into a platform. It is how the teenager in Morvant, Debe or Scarborough gets more than a tour of a high-tech facility. It is how a local creative builds a global product, an energy company optimises operations, a university researcher trains a model on Caribbean data or a startup earns serious foreign exchange instead of simply consuming imported technology.

From resource economy to intelligence economy: the Caribbean’s real opportunity

Trinidad and Tobago has a chance to become a Caribbean testbed for responsible, export-oriented, wealth-generating AI: powered not by speeches about disruption, but by research, regional connectivity, talent mobility, trustworthy governance and local ownership of value. If we get this right, the country can be more than a convenient location for machines. It can become a place where the next generation of Caribbean AI companies is conceived, trained, financed and exported; where the next tech millionaires are born; or where the “Islands of Intelligence” becomes a rival to Silicon Valley.

The world once dismissed the idea that a small island city-state with no natural resources could become a global financial and trade hub—Singapore—or that a tiny Baltic nation of 1.3 million people, similar in size to Trinidad and Tobago, could become the world’s most advanced digital-governance model—Estonia. Both Singapore and Estonia proved that size is irrelevant when vision is deliberate. The Caribbean has the talent, the geography, the culture and now the infrastructure opportunity to write its own version of that story.

My “Islands of Intelligence” concept—a region that competes on intelligence, creativity and systems—is not an impossible vision. It is simply one that requires us to be intentional rather than passive. Call it what you will, but the Caribbean has everything it needs to build its own Silicon Valley story. The “Islands of Intelligence” is not a fantasy. It is a choice.

For decades, Leve Global has helped governments, development agencies and businesses translate ambitious visions into strategies, systems and investments that create durable value. That practical experience across economic transformation projects is a reminder that infrastructure becomes transformative only when it is embedded in a wider system of capabilities, accountability and locally owned opportunity.

Build the system or admit we are renting our future

The proposed AI data centre may prove valuable. It may create a genuine opening for diversification, digital resilience and regional leadership. But the outcome is not determined by how many megawatts are announced at a signing ceremony. It will be determined by what Trinidad and Tobago requires in return, measures in public, and builds around the infrastructure long after the ribbon is cut.

We should stop asking the timid question: “Are we getting an AI data centre?” The question is larger and harder: are we building the systems and ecosystem that allow Trinbagonians to own a serious part of the value chain? Are we preparing young people for high-value work and entrepreneurship opportunities? Are we building research capacity, local firms, export pathways and public safeguards? Are we selecting the investments we want or accepting the ones that arrive? Are we being sold to or are we actively buying what we want and need for a sustainable future? Are we generating wealth for an outsider—plantation-style—or are we setting the stage and building the systems that achieve Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s call for “moonshots” in innovation and technology for the Caribbean region?

AI is still young enough for Trinidad and Tobago to get it right and lead in a focused way. But leadership is intentional. The winners of this age of intelligence will not be remembered for hosting AI. They will be remembered for the systems they built with it. The choice before us is simple: set a clear vision, design the industry we want, negotiate the terms, actively attract the investors, and own our future—or leave the default settings on and let AI happen to us much as tourism happened to the Caribbean.

So perhaps, now is the time to get it right. I’d like to recommend that the government of Trinidad and Tobago develop a future-oriented, integrated and inclusive AI policy and strategy looking at how we can leverage high value opportunities for economic development, export, entrepreneurship, and building the right ecosystems for the country to take advantage of AI.

The choice is ours: build a custom system or accept the default settings.