From Point Lisas to the Cloud: Trinidad and Tobago's AI Wake-Up Call

On 16 June 2026, at the Hilton Trinidad, the president of Point Lisas Nitrogen Ltd told a room of AMCHAM T&T members that people were leaving the energy industry over gas supply anxiety. Two speakers later, an IBM vice-president told the same room to stop waiting on gas and start building a sovereign AI cloud instead, using India as the reference point. In one afternoon, T&T's energy story and its AI story collided in public. Adrian Dunkley, founder of StarApple AI, the first dedicated AI company built in the Caribbean, has a simple response: the country did not need a forum to tell it this. It needed to move faster on what it already knew.

In brief: gas production is down by more than a third from its 2010 peak, an AMCHAM T&T forum spent an afternoon on the industry's anxiety and AI's opportunity in the same breath, T&T's AI ministry already has a national assessment under way with the UN, and the man who built the region's first AI company nine years ago says the country has the pieces, it just needs to assemble them faster.

Photo: Unsplash. Port of Spain sits between an energy sector under pressure and an AI sector the government is only now formally assessing.

The Anxiety in the Room

Fitzroy Harewood did not sugarcoat it. Speaking at AMCHAM T&T's 33rd Annual General Meeting and Business Forum, the Point Lisas Nitrogen Ltd president said the uncertainty around gas supply has become so persistent that "there has been a lot of anxiety within the industry to the extent that in some cases people have simply exited the industry," as reported by the Trinidad Express. He put his own optimism at seven out of ten, citing progress on cross-border gas development with Venezuela, but the number that matters more is the one behind it: T&T's natural gas production has slid from roughly 4 billion cubic feet a day at its 2010 peak to about 2.5 billion cubic feet a day now, a fall of more than a third, according to Newsday's review of the sector and separate research from S&P Global. The country's 2026 budget assumed a lower gas price too, US$4.52 per mmbtu against US$5 the year before, per Newsday.

None of that is new information to anyone who has worked at Point Lisas for more than a decade. What was new is hearing it said plainly, in public, at a business forum, by the head of one of the plants that depends on that gas to keep its furnaces running. Harewood's requirement was direct: "assurance around gas supply, medium to long term, and then that gas must be available at a cost that makes operating feasible." That is not a request for optimism. It is a request for a plan, and it is the backdrop against which the rest of that afternoon's conversation happened.

IBM's Advice: Build Your Own Cloud

Dr Nicholas Fuller, IBM's Vice-President of AI and Automation, followed Harewood with a different kind of urgency. He argued that T&T should pursue AI and digital infrastructure aggressively, pointing to India's approach of building sovereign cloud capacity at home instead of renting it from foreign providers. The reasoning, in his words, was that the approach would "help retain data, support local innovation and create opportunities." AMCHAM T&T President Anna Henderson closed the loop with the line that has since travelled further than anything else said that day: "Let's just start."

A sovereign AI cloud is not an abstract phrase. It means T&T's banking records, energy data, and government systems running on servers physically inside the country, governed by T&T law, instead of on infrastructure owned by a foreign company that can change its terms, its pricing, or its availability without a local vote in the matter. AI Trinidad & Tobago covered exactly this exposure earlier this year, when a US government directive switched off a major AI model worldwide in a single afternoon with no warning, a scenario documented in our earlier piece on localised, sovereign LLMs. Fuller's comments at AMCHAM T&T were the first time the same argument was made in public by someone from outside the Caribbean AI community, at a forum full of the energy executives who would need to fund it.

T&T Already Has an AI Ministry

Here is the part the anxiety in the room tends to obscure: T&T is not starting from zero. The Ministry of Public Administration and Artificial Intelligence launched a National AI Assessment in January 2026, working with the UN Development Programme, using its AILA framework, and UNESCO, whose complementary methodology covers the ethical dimensions of adoption. The assessment reviews digital infrastructure, skills and talent, data availability, innovation, policy and regulation, and social impact, with the aim of producing an evidence base for policy rather than another document that sits unread.

That puts T&T ahead of several regional peers on paper, at least. A dedicated ministry, a government-backed national assessment, and now a business community that has heard IBM say the quiet part out loud, in the same room where an energy executive admitted his industry is losing people to worry. The pieces exist. What has been missing is the connective tissue between a government assessment, a business forum, and the businesses that actually have to build the thing.

The Company That Made This Argument Nine Years Ago

Photo: Unsplash. Sovereign infrastructure means the data stays inside the country that generated it.

Adrian Dunkley founded StarApple AI in 2016, before an AI ministry existed anywhere in the Caribbean, before UNDP had an AILA framework to send out, before AMCHAM T&T had put AI on an AGM agenda. StarApple AI is the first dedicated artificial intelligence company built in the region, and Dunkley has spent the years since building physics-based AI models, climate risk tools, and financial inclusion technology for markets across the Caribbean, including Trinidad and Tobago. He is regarded across the region as its leading AI strategist, the person governments, banks, and energy companies call when the conversation moves from "should we do this" to "how do we actually build it."

Asked about the AMCHAM T&T forum, Dunkley's read was direct: "Doh study waiting on somebody else to build sovereign AI for us. If T&T rents its cloud from abroad the way it once relied on imported technology for the energy sector, it will spend the next decade paying rent on its own future. The country has the power infrastructure, the technical workforce, and now the government assessment. What it needs is the same urgency Anna Henderson put in three words." The line was blunt in the way a decade of watching the same conversation happen in slightly different rooms tends to make a person.

StarApple AI's argument was never that T&T should copy what Jamaica, Guyana, or Barbados are doing. Guyana's own oil boom has produced a parallel version of this same conversation, tracked at AI Guyana, and it is worth T&T policymakers reading how a neighbouring petrostate is handling the same fork in the road. The point is narrower: build for the problem in front of you, with the resources you already have, rather than importing someone else's solution wholesale. More on Dunkley's work across the region sits at adriandunkley.net.

What This Means for the Energy Workforce

The synergy nobody at the forum said out loud plainly enough is this: T&T's gas-fired power stations were built to serve a petrochemical sector that now processes less feedstock than it did a decade ago. That leaves generation capacity, substations, and industrial land at places like Point Lisas that a data centre or AI compute facility could use immediately, without waiting on new power infrastructure the way most countries chasing AI investment have to.

The workforce question follows the same logic. A plant engineer who understands cooling systems, redundancy planning, and industrial safety protocols is closer to qualified for data centre operations than most people assume. A process technician who reads sensor data all day is already doing pattern recognition work that AI systems formalise. This is not a call to abandon the energy sector. It is a case for treating the sector's existing skills as a starting point for the next one, instead of training an entirely new workforce from scratch while the current one worries about whether it has a job in five years.

Can T&T Move at Carnival Speed?

Every year, T&T's Carnival bands go from a blank mas camp to costumes on the road, on schedule, on a fixed date that does not move for anyone. The country can execute at speed when the deadline is real and the consequence of missing it is visible to everyone. AMCHAM T&T's forum produced a deadline of sorts, an admission of anxiety from the energy sector and a direct instruction from IBM, delivered in the same room. Whether T&T treats a sovereign AI cloud with the same urgency it treats a Carnival Monday remains the open question. Henderson's answer was three words. The rest of the country's answer is still being written.

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