Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

The Unit­ed States has ex­pressed its will­ing­ness to sup­port Trinidad and To­ba­go’s am­bi­tions to be­come a re­gion­al dig­i­tal hub.

How­ev­er, a se­nior of­fi­cial of the US In­ter­na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment Fi­nance Cor­po­ra­tion (DFC) has stressed that de­ci­sions re­gard­ing the de­vel­op­ment of da­ta cen­tres ul­ti­mate­ly rest with the Gov­ern­ment and peo­ple of T&T.

“The peo­ple of Trinidad and the lead­er­ship will need to de­cide what kind of da­ta cen­tres they want here and in what quan­ti­ty, and we’ll stand ready to sup­port what­ev­er they de­cide,” said DFC Chief Pol­i­cy Of­fi­cer Car­o­line Vik.

Vik made the com­ments in an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia hours af­ter meet­ing Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar last Tues­day.

The meet­ing fol­lowed the Gov­ern­ment’s an­nounce­ment that it had signed three Mem­o­ran­da of Un­der­stand­ing (MoUs), in­clud­ing agree­ments with two Amer­i­can com­pa­nies, to pur­sue a mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence in­fra­struc­ture project.

One of those MoUs is with Hum­ming­bird AI, led by Trinida­di­an en­tre­pre­neur Marc-Kwe­si Far­rell, dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture spe­cial­ist Ash­ton So­ni­at, in­fra­struc­ture fi­nance ex­ec­u­tive Nicholaus Rohled­er and project de­liv­ery ex­pert Jake McE­wan. The team says it has col­lec­tive­ly over­seen more than US$10 bil­lion in in­fra­struc­ture de­vel­op­ment projects world­wide.

The pro­posed de­vel­op­ment of AI-fo­cused da­ta cen­tres in T&T has gen­er­at­ed both en­thu­si­asm and scep­ti­cism, with de­bate cen­tring on is­sues such as en­er­gy de­mand, sus­tain­abil­i­ty and long-term eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits.

Vik is vis­it­ing the Caribbean as part of a re­gion­al tour that al­so in­cludes Ja­maica and An­tigua and Bar­bu­da.

Dur­ing her vis­it to T&T, she al­so met with min­is­ters re­spon­si­ble for key eco­nom­ic port­fo­lios to dis­cuss po­ten­tial in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties.

She said both sides agreed to es­tab­lish a work­ing group, with dis­cus­sions ex­pect­ed to be­gin vir­tu­al­ly as ear­ly as next week to iden­ti­fy projects aligned with the pri­or­i­ties of both the Gov­ern­ment and the DFC.

Vik de­scribed the DFC as the Unit­ed States Gov­ern­ment’s in­ter­na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment fi­nance in­sti­tu­tion. She not­ed that the agency has US$205 bil­lion in glob­al in­vest­ment ca­pac­i­ty and, fol­low­ing changes to its man­date, can now in­vest in a broad­er range of coun­tries than pre­vi­ous­ly.

“We’re here to do busi­ness de­vel­op­ment, to un­der­stand the pri­or­i­ties of the Gov­ern­ment and then to find the pri­vate sec­tor com­pa­nies that we can work with to ex­e­cute on those pri­or­i­ties,” she said.

The DFC’s in­vest­ment strat­e­gy is cen­tred on three broad ob­jec­tives: strength­en­ing sup­ply chains for crit­i­cal ma­te­ri­als, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and agri­cul­tur­al in­puts; sup­port­ing strate­gic sec­tors such as en­er­gy, ad­vanced man­u­fac­tur­ing, ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence and fi­nan­cial ser­vices; and fi­nanc­ing crit­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture, in­clud­ing ports, air­ports, trans­porta­tion cor­ri­dors, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works, sub­sea ca­bles, fi­bre net­works and da­ta cen­tres.

Those pri­or­i­ties trans­late in­to po­ten­tial in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties across en­er­gy, dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture, health­care, fi­nan­cial ser­vices, food and agri­cul­ture, hard in­fra­struc­ture and crit­i­cal min­er­als.

Vik said dis­cus­sions with the Min­istry of En­er­gy have al­ready iden­ti­fied sev­er­al up­stream and mid­stream en­er­gy projects for fur­ther re­view dur­ing fol­low-up meet­ings.

She added that op­por­tu­ni­ties may al­so ex­ist with­in the health­care sec­tor, al­though dis­cus­sions re­main at an ear­ly stage as the DFC con­tin­ues to as­sess the coun­try’s pri­or­i­ties.

While no spe­cif­ic fund­ing al­lo­ca­tion has been ear­marked for the Caribbean, Vik said the re­gion has be­come an in­creas­ing­ly im­por­tant fo­cus for the agency.

“We’re re­al­ly build­ing re­la­tion­ships in all the coun­tries where we haven’t been ac­tive in the past, un­der­stand­ing their pri­or­i­ties and build­ing our pipeline. We look for­ward to be­ing very ac­tive in this re­gion go­ing for­ward,” she said.

Vik em­pha­sised that while the DFC works close­ly with gov­ern­ments to iden­ti­fy na­tion­al pri­or­i­ties, its in­vest­ments are typ­i­cal­ly chan­nelled through pri­vate sec­tor part­ners rather than gov­ern­ments them­selves.

She de­scribed the mod­el as a dual-track ap­proach, un­der which gov­ern­ments help iden­ti­fy pri­or­i­ty sec­tors and projects while pri­vate com­pa­nies serve as in­vest­ment part­ners re­spon­si­ble for ex­e­cu­tion.

“Our coun­ter­par­ty, the peo­ple we ac­tu­al­ly in­vest in, are al­ways pri­vate sec­tor. We can, in some in­stances, work with state-owned en­ter­pris­es, but for the vast ma­jor­i­ty of the time we would work with the port op­er­a­tor or the min­ing com­pa­ny to im­ple­ment the vi­sion that the Gov­ern­ment has,” she said.

She added that com­pa­nies do not need to wait for gov­ern­ments to sub­mit projects be­fore en­gag­ing with the DFC. Busi­ness­es with vi­able pro­pos­als are en­cour­aged to ap­proach the agency di­rect­ly for po­ten­tial fi­nanc­ing, pro­vid­ed their projects align with both DFC pri­or­i­ties and na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment ob­jec­tives.

Look­ing ahead, she said she hopes T&T will have de­vel­oped a strong pipeline of projects with­in the next year, paving the way for in­vest­ment agree­ments to be fi­nalised and con­struc­tion ac­tiv­i­ty to be­gin in the years that fol­low.