Govt confirms that Tier 4 data centre under construction

The Min­istry of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence (MPAAI) is clar­i­fy­ing re­ports sur­round­ing a da­ta cen­tre project.

In re­sponse to a Ju­ly 19 Sun­day Guardian re­port it con­firmed that the Tier 4 project was ini­ti­at­ed un­der the for­mer Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) ad­min­is­tra­tion to pro­vide se­cure Gov­ern­ment da­ta stor­age and dig­i­tal ser­vices.

How­ev­er, it made it clear that Gov­ern­ment was not se­cret­ly ad­vanc­ing in­fra­struc­ture for an ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) da­ta cen­tre even though the lo­ca­tion of the project still has not been dis­closed.

“That claim is patent­ly false and is built on a fun­da­men­tal er­ror,” the min­istry said in tak­ing is­sue with the head­line to the sto­ry.

“Its Tier IV clas­si­fi­ca­tion refers on­ly to the re­li­a­bil­i­ty and re­silience of the fa­cil­i­ty. It is not a mea­sure of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence ca­pa­bil­i­ty. By con­trast, the AI fa­cil­i­ties con­tem­plat­ed un­der the Gov­ern­ment’s Mem­o­ran­da of Un­der­stand­ing with Ernst & Young LLP and Hum­ming­bird AI Hold­ings are pro­posed com­mer­cial, high-per­for­mance com­put­ing fa­cil­i­ties in­tend­ed to sup­port en­ter­prise AI and oth­er ad­vanced com­put­ing ap­pli­ca­tions. They in­volve a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent tech­ni­cal ar­chi­tec­ture, in­vest­ment mod­el and pur­pose,” the Min­istry said.

It fur­ther stressed that de­spite pro­cure­ment ac­tiv­i­ty the project was not yet ful­ly op­er­a­tionalised.

“The MPAAI re­mains com­mit­ted to trans­paren­cy, the mod­erni­sa­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture, and the re­spon­si­ble ad­vance­ment of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence in the na­tion­al in­ter­est,” it added.