On Friday 10 July, at the United States Embassy’s independence celebration in Port of Spain, the Government of Trinidad and Tobago signed three memoranda of understanding. Two of them concern data centres.
The country began arguing that same weekend.
One side says this is the future and we would be fools to refuse it. The other side says we are being taken. Both sides are certain. Both sides are loud. And neither side has read the contract, because the contract does not exist.
A memorandum of understanding is not a contract. It commits nobody to anything. It is a piece of paper that says two parties intend to keep talking.
So the loudest voices in this country are, at this moment, arguing about a blank page.
I am not the person you expect to be saying this
I teach artificial intelligence for a living. I have spent more than a year in rooms full of business owners, church congregations, and community groups across this country, showing ordinary people what these tools can actually do. I want Trinidad and Tobago to have this technology.
That is exactly why I want to know what it costs.
I am not a critic of AI. I am a teacher of it. And a teacher’s first instinct, when somebody hands him a page with no numbers on it, is to ask where the numbers went.
We have done a version of this before
At La Brea, this country built a 720 megawatt power plant for an aluminium smelter.
The smelter never came.
The plant did. And we are still paying for it.
That is not an argument against data centres. It is an argument about what happens when the electricity arrives before the terms do. It happened here, within living memory, and the bill did not go away because the project did.
What a citizen can actually do
You cannot tell me this deal is good. You have not seen the price of the electricity, the volume of the water, the length of the contract, or the exit clause.
I cannot tell you it is bad. I have not seen them either.
But there is exactly one demand available to a citizen while the page is still blank, and it is not a slogan. It is a list.
THE SEVEN QUESTIONS
1. Which cooling system are you using, and is it in the contract?
2. What price are you paying for the electricity, and for how many years?
3. How many permanent jobs, doing what, in year three?
4. In the worst month of a dry year, how much water will this building take?
5. Who owns the computing, and can Trinidad and Tobago use any of it?
6. What happens when they leave?
7. Can we get out, and what does it cost us?
Seven lines. Not clever, not technical. These are the questions you would ask if a stranger knocked on your door and offered to rent your back yard for twenty years.
Screenshot them. Send them to somebody. Bring them to a meeting and read them out.
I am not going to answer them for you. I do not have the answers, and anybody who tells you they do is guessing. The answers do not belong in a press conference. They belong in a contract, signed, in public, where a citizen can read them.
This week
Over the next four days I am going to take this apart properly.
What is actually inside these buildings.
What they drink, and why my mother in Arima is the person who should be asking.
Why these companies are looking at a small island in the first place. And the honest case for and against, both columns, argued with equal force, with no verdict at the end, because a verdict would be a lie.
But everything I write this week comes back to those seven lines.
The deal has not been written yet.
That is not a reason to relax. It is the only reason any of this is still worth saying.
Show us the terms.
Curtis Jordan is the founder of the Curtis Jordan Coaching Academy. He teaches artificial intelligence to businesses, churches, and community groups across Trinidad and Tobago.
The book is free. Five short chapters. One evening’s reading.
