Trinidad Signed 450 Megawatts of AI Deals. The Caribbean AI Forum Meets in Two Weeks to Write the Rules It Skipped

Photo via Unsplash

Two things are true about Trinidad and Tobago this month, and most of the coverage treating them separately is missing the point. On July 11, 2026, the government signed memorandums of understanding with Hummingbird AI Holdings of Florida and Ernst and Young LLP of New York, laying groundwork for a proposed 150 megawatt AI infrastructure facility and a 300 megawatt data center. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar framed the announcement, alongside a related steel industry deal, as more than 5,000 jobs walking through the door. Twelve days later, on July 23 and 24, the Caribbean Telecommunications Union brings ministers, regulators, academics, and civil society to the University Inn Conference Centre on the UWI St Augustine campus for the first Caribbean AI Forum, where the region's own AI Task Force releases the governance framework it has spent nine months building.

Same country. Same month. Same technology. The data center MOUs came first, and the rulebook comes second. I have spent close to two decades building AI capacity in this region, and I can tell you exactly how this sequence usually ends: the infrastructure gets built to the standard the buyer wanted, and the governance conversation arrives in time to review a decision that already has concrete poured. Trinidad and Tobago is not doing anything unusual by regional standards. It is doing what every small, capital-hungry economy does when a 450 megawatt offer shows up before the region has agreed on how to evaluate one. What is unusual is having the evidence of the problem and the forum meant to fix it happen in the same country, weeks apart, where everyone can see the sequence for what it is.

Photo via Unsplash

What Trinidad Actually Signed

Strip away the press conference language and the two MOUs are narrow, deliberately so. The Hummingbird AI Holdings agreement sets up a framework for "preliminary cooperation, due diligence and coordination" toward a 150 megawatt AI infrastructure and data center facility. It is not a construction contract. The Ernst and Young agreement is similarly a framework for collaboration on large-scale data center development, with the firm planning to bring in third-party partners for the 300 megawatt facility it envisions. Neither MOU commits a shovel to the ground. Both commit the country to a negotiating posture, and posture is exactly where governance terms either get built in or get left out.

The government's framing leaned on jobs. Persad-Bissessar described the combined announcements, which also included a steel industry revival deal with Pinnacle Steel and Vanadium Corporation, as delivering more than 5,000 positions. That is a real number for a country the size of Trinidad and Tobago, and I am not going to pretend job creation is a minor consideration for any Caribbean government weighing an AI infrastructure deal. But 5,000 jobs across three separate initiatives is a different claim than 5,000 jobs from two data centers, and the MOU stage of a due diligence framework is not the stage at which employment figures get audited. It is the stage at which the terms that will eventually produce those jobs, or fail to, get set.

What the MOUs do not appear to specify, based on everything reported publicly so far, is a water allocation ceiling, an energy-source requirement, or a disclosure obligation for either facility's operational draw once running. That is the gap that matters, and it is the gap the CTU Task Force spent the past nine months trying to close for the whole region, not fast enough to have terms ready before Trinidad's own signing ceremony.

Photo via Unsplash

Why the Water and Power Question Is Not Theoretical

Trinidad and Tobago's water supply problems are not a footnote to this story. Much of the country runs on a scheduled water system managed by the state utility, and in some communities the tap runs as infrequently as once a week, which is why water tanks are a standard household fixture rather than a backup plan. Social activist Dr. Wayne Kublalsingh has already put the sharpest version of the concern on the record, describing the data center announcements as something that "looks like development, but which is not development," and pointing specifically at the energy and water load that facilities of this scale place on infrastructure already under strain.

A combined 450 megawatts is not a small ask of any grid, and cooling a data center of that size, depending on the design chosen, can mean a meaningful water draw as well. Globally, data center electricity consumption is projected to reach 935 terawatt-hours by 2030, close to 3 percent of the planet's total electricity use, according to industry projections cited in coverage of the Trinidad deal. Whether Hummingbird AI Holdings and Ernst and Young build water-efficient, air-cooled facilities or the thirstier alternative is exactly the kind of design decision a governance framework should pin down before an MOU gets signed, not after. Right now, nothing public says which way it will go, and the region's own AI Task Force has spent its nine-month mandate building the kind of framework that would force that disclosure. It simply was not ready in time to apply to this deal.

The Report the Forum Is Actually Releasing

The Caribbean AI Task Force was chartered off a mandate approved at the CTU's 31st General Conference in October 2025, and it has pulled together more than 35 experts spanning governments, academic institutions, civil society, and the private sector. Its interim findings describe what the report calls a connectivity paradox: a region with genuinely high rates of digital engagement sitting on top of fragile infrastructure, expensive connectivity, fragmented national regulation, and weak data governance. That paradox is precisely why a single country can sign a 450 megawatt deal on a Friday with no regional framework to check it against. There has not been one to check it against.

The Task Force's five recommendations, due for full release and an implementation roadmap at the Forum, are specific enough to matter. A CARICOM-wide AI governance framework built around model laws member states can adapt rather than draft from nothing. A Caribbean Data Commons to give the region shared infrastructure instead of fourteen separate, thinner efforts. Targeted support for AI applications in agriculture, disaster management, tourism, finance, health, and public administration, sectors where the payoff is highest and the risk of getting it wrong is measured in real harm, not abstract policy failure. Investment in AI literacy and capacity-building aimed squarely at the brain drain that keeps pulling trained people out of the region before they can apply what they learned here. And the Forum itself, meant to become an annual platform rather than a one-time event, so this cycle of infrastructure racing ahead of governance stops repeating every time a new deal lands.

The Forum's agenda, running July 23 and 24 at the University Inn Conference Centre, backs up the seriousness of the intent. Sessions cover human-centered AI ethics, data sovereignty, cybersecurity, and intellectual property, alongside a Women in AI discussion, a youth debate on workforce development, climate resilience applications, and an economic transformation roundtable. Julie Koon Koon, lead data scientist at Republic Bank and a data science lecturer, is among the confirmed speakers, a useful signal that the private sector voices in the room understand the technical substance, not just the policy language.

The Investment Gap That Explains Why This Keeps Happening

None of this happens in a vacuum, and it is worth being honest about why a government takes an MOU meeting before a governance framework exists to check it against. The ECLAC-CENIA Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index, released in October 2025, put a hard number on a problem every Caribbean policymaker already feels: the region generates 6.6 percent of global GDP and draws just 1.12 percent of global AI investment. No country in Latin America or the Caribbean exceeds the world average for AI investment relative to GDP per capita, and the regional average sits roughly six times below that line. When 450 megawatts of interest shows up, unsolicited, from two international firms, the temptation to sign first and sort the terms out later is not a mystery. It is what chronic underinvestment does to a government's negotiating patience.

That context does not excuse the sequencing. It explains it, which is a different thing and the thing that actually needs fixing. A region starved of AI investment for a decade is exactly the region that needs governance terms locked in before the first big offer arrives, not after, because it will not have the room to renegotiate once the facility is built and the jobs are counted. The CTU Task Force's own framing gets this right: the risk is that Caribbean nations become passive rule-takers in a consolidating global AI market, and passive rule-taking is precisely what happens when a country signs first and reads the regional rulebook second.

Photo via Unsplash

What Would Actually Change the Sequence

There is a version of this story that is a straightforward win, and it is worth naming so the Forum has a target. UWI's own Institute for Intelligent Systems Governance and Human-Centered Technology, known as I-INSIGHT, launched in May 2026 with a five million dollar investment from Sagicor Financial Corporation. Its first operational arm, the Sagicor UWI AI and Financial Services Hub, begins rolling out across UWI campuses in August, with future hubs planned for tourism, agriculture, healthcare, climate resilience, and public administration. That is a private sector partner and a regional university building governance and technical capacity together, on a timeline that ran ahead of any single deal rather than behind one. It is the model the Task Force's own recommendations are asking CARICOM governments to scale, and it sits on the same campus hosting the Forum in two weeks.

What the Forum needs to produce, concretely, is three things. First, a model AI governance law that CARICOM member states can adapt in months rather than draft from a blank page over years, because the gap between "we should have a framework" and "we have a law on the books" is exactly where the next Trinidad-style MOU will land unchecked. Second, a binding disclosure standard for water and energy consumption on any data center project above a stated capacity threshold, so the next 450 megawatt announcement comes with a public number attached to it before ground breaks, not after activists have to ask for one. Third, a tracking mechanism, public and specific, that measures every future infrastructure agreement against the framework instead of the other way around. Anything short of that is a very well-attended conference producing a report that the next MOU will also outrun.

I founded StarApple AI in 2019 because I believed then, and believe now, that the Caribbean does not get to treat AI infrastructure and AI governance as two projects on two different clocks, run by two different institutions, arriving years apart. The region cannot afford the version of this story where the data centers get built to whatever standard the international partner proposes and the governance conversation shows up afterward to grade the outcome. Trinidad and Tobago just handed the whole region a live example of exactly why that sequence fails, twelve days before the people responsible for fixing it sit down two campuses away. The Caribbean AI Forum has one job worth measuring: prove the framework can move as fast as the deals it is supposed to govern. If it cannot, the next 450 megawatts will not wait for it either.

"A country with a weekly water schedule signing 450 megawatts of AI infrastructure before the region has a rulebook is not a scandal. It is what chronic underinvestment does to a government's patience. The Forum's job is to make sure it never has to happen that way again." - Adrian Dunkley, AI Boss