Ke­jan Haynes

Lead Ed­i­tor – News­gath­er­ing

ke­jan.haynes@guardian.co.tt

MEX­I­CO CITY, Mex­i­co—As Trinidad and To­ba­go de­bates the ben­e­fits and risks of pro­posed da­ta cen­tres, the head of one of Latin Amer­i­ca’s largest dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture com­pa­nies says such projects should be judged by what they leave be­hind, not sim­ply by how much en­er­gy they con­sume.

Speak­ing ex­clu­sive­ly to Guardian Me­dia on the side­lines of the launch of CAF’s new VELA Fund in Mex­i­co City, So­mos Cap­i­tal CEO For­rest Heath said da­ta cen­tres are nei­ther in­her­ent­ly good nor bad. In­stead, gov­ern­ments should as­sess whether they cre­ate last­ing ben­e­fits for lo­cal com­mu­ni­ties.

Heath, a North Car­oli­na na­tive who moved to Colom­bia and helped build one of South Amer­i­ca’s largest in­ter­net in­fra­struc­ture com­pa­nies, said da­ta cen­tres can act as an “an­chor cus­tomer” for ma­jor in­fra­struc­ture projects that would oth­er­wise strug­gle to at­tract in­vest­ment.

“The key piece here is what are you ac­com­plish­ing with da­ta cen­tres?” he said.

“My whole fram­ing ... is they’re an an­chor cus­tomer that can cre­ate a way to close fi­nan­cial­ly a lot of re­al­ly big in­fra­struc­ture projects that his­tor­i­cal­ly haven’t made sense.”

How­ev­er, he cau­tioned against projects that sim­ply con­sume elec­tric­i­ty with­out con­tribut­ing to the lo­cal econ­o­my.

“We have to be cog­nisant of and be re­al­ly in­ten­tion­al ... how is it ac­tu­al­ly cre­at­ing an ecosys­tem of jobs and con­struc­tion and de­vel­op­ment?” he said.

“My fram­ing and analy­sis of any da­ta cen­tre project is, is it ac­tu­al­ly a net pos­i­tive to the places that it’s touch­ing, or is it com­ing in and just ba­si­cal­ly be­ing a con­sumer of en­er­gy?”

Heath point­ed to Colom­bia, where lim­i­ta­tions in elec­tric­i­ty trans­mis­sion mean some re­gions have sur­plus pow­er that can­not eas­i­ly be ex­port­ed.

“There’s en­er­gy that can be turned in­to val­ue that isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly be­ing tak­en ad­van­tage of,” he said.

Rather than im­port­ing for­eign work­ers to build and op­er­ate fa­cil­i­ties, he ar­gued, coun­tries should use these in­vest­ments to de­vel­op lo­cal ex­per­tise.

“How do you build en­gi­neers and build places that we’re serv­ing ... us­ing it as a cat­a­lyst to build en­gi­neer­ing tal­ent and to build tech­ni­cians and to be a re­al con­trib­u­tor to the places that it’s serv­ing?”

As de­bate con­tin­ues over Trinidad and To­ba­go’s pro­posed da­ta cen­tre de­vel­op­ments, Heath al­so sought to de­mys­ti­fy what a da­ta cen­tre ac­tu­al­ly is.

“In its re­al­ly sim­ple form, it’s a big com­put­er,” he said.

“You’re tak­ing elec­tric­i­ty ... to process da­ta for some pur­pose, whether that be to run some­thing like Chat­G­PT, to be train­ing new mod­els or to be run­ning health­care.”

He ac­knowl­edged con­cerns over en­er­gy use but said many crit­i­cisms are based on old­er tech­nol­o­gy.

“The very so­phis­ti­cat­ed new ones don’t con­sume wa­ter and they don’t gen­er­ate that much noise. They still con­sume a lot of en­er­gy, which is the thing that has to be thought about.”

For small­er coun­tries, Heath said the de­ci­sion should come down to whether such projects pro­vide tan­gi­ble na­tion­al ben­e­fits.

“It’s not uni­ver­sal­ly good. They’re al­so uni­ver­sal­ly not bad,” he said. “As with any com­pli­cat­ed piece of in­fra­struc­ture, there are trade-offs.”

He al­so urged Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean to de­vel­op tech­nol­o­gy tai­lored to re­gion­al needs rather than sim­ply copy­ing larg­er economies.

“We have the abil­i­ty to leapfrog Eu­rope and the US,” he said. “There’s a lot of op­por­tu­ni­ties to solve our prob­lems here in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean ... with lo­cal tal­ent, with lo­cal en­gi­neer­ing, to build so­lu­tions for our prob­lems and then hope­ful­ly ex­port them to the world.”

The in­ter­view took place dur­ing the launch of CAF’s VELA Fund, a new im­pact in­vest­ment ini­tia­tive sup­port­ing busi­ness­es fo­cused on bio­di­ver­si­ty, re­gen­er­a­tive agri­cul­ture, fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion and oth­er sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment projects across Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean. CAF said it hopes the fund will help suc­cess­ful busi­ness­es scale across small­er economies, in­clud­ing those in the Caribbean.