The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) regarding the proposed data center in Trinidad and Tobago is already under serious review in social media. It’s an issue of social permission.
“We will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens,” he said.
“If these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large.
Davos 2026, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
“We will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens,” he said. “If these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large.
This is something that has rung true throughout this year across the world. There is also talk that their marketing promises have not been realized. There is promise. There isn’t a visible outcome.
Europe is taking stabs at its own digital sovereignty; to not rely on foreign corporations when it comes to their digital needs, from open source software to their own infrastructure.
Guyana has a MOU for a datacenter with Cerebras Systems. That MOU is more mature, and has more information than is presently to be had in the Trinidad and Tobago MOU. The Guyanese MOU explicitly discusses digital sovereignty.
To have their information processed locally, to have their information available locally, and to allow them to diversify their economy with incubators. Digital sovereignty, and thus data sovereignty, are key. The same ‘free’ platforms used throughout Trinidad and Tobago profit by using advertising and also by extracting information from their users.
Without digital sovereignty, Trinidad and Tobago risks building physical infrastructure for the same extractive digital relationship it already inhabits as a consumer. Europe knows that and is working toward their own digital sovereignty. Apparently, so does Guyana. The Trinidad and Tobago MOU is still early. This may be an advantage. The negotiation is in process.
Can It Be Done?
The heart of the questions related to the data center are rightly about electricity and water. Those are problems that need to be solved for social permission to exist. Closed-loop cooling can reduce the demand placed on the public water system, though it is a two-loop system and the heat must ultimately be rejected into the environment, often through evaporation.
That concern is real, particularly in a country that has water supply issues. The electrical load issue in the United States has been, in some cases, promised to be handled by the company itself. The data center does not have to depend on the local grid.
Generating equipment would have to be designed for the sea-salt laden air found even inland on an island. This could be done in Trinidad and Tobago as well, though it would not be an easy prospect. It could be that T&TEC builds out capacity for them, but data centres are often designed around the rule of five nines: 99.999% availability.
That requires redundancy throughout the power system, including backup generation. It wasn’t that long ago that a fungus-affected tree helped knock out the entire Trinidad electricity system.
Electrical capacity and electrical resilience are not the same thing. These constraints can be placed on the companies designing, building and managing the data center. It would likely mean improving the policies and standards in Trinidad and Tobago, and ensuring that these are enforced.
So, at least in theory, it could be done. It might even be maintained. All of that would need to be part of the due diligence of the MOU.
Should It Be Done?
That is the question of social permission. Around the world, data centers have been under attack figuratively and in the Middle East, literally.
In the United States…
“The public is concerned about rising electricity rates caused by data centers. They are concerned about the enormous water use that data centers require. They’re concerned about public handouts in the form of tax breaks that are going to data center developers, and they’re also aware that data centers don’t bring meaningful economic development, especially in the form of jobs.
Why are communities pushing back against data centers?, Ben Green (quoted by Liz Mineo), Harvard Gazette, April 9th, 2026
These concerns should sound familiar. The Trinidad and Tobago announcement speaks of 5,000 jobs, but that figure covers three separate proposed projects. We don’t know that there will be tax breaks, but public handouts to attract investment are certainly not unheard of anywhere in the world, while corporations are not known for largesse.
The real question of social permission relies on Trinidad and Tobago getting what it wants and needs in return for what the data center investors get. It’s early, but it can quickly become too late without transparency and civil society input.
About the author
Taran Rampersad has over three decades of experience working with technology, the majority of which was as a software engineer.
He is a published author on virtual worlds and was part of the team of writers at WorldChanging.com that won the Utne Award and an outspoken advocate of simplifying processes and bending technology’s use to society’s needs.
His volunteer work related to technology and disasters has been mentioned by the media (BBC), and is one of the plank-owners of combining culture with ICT in the Caribbean (ICT) through CARDICIS and has volunteered time towards those ends.
As an amateur photographer, he has been published in educational books, magazines, websites and NASA’s ‘Sensing The Planet’.
