TL;DR: Curacao committed $25 million to a new submarine cable in March 2026. Guyana signed with Cerebras Systems in November 2025 for a 100-megawatt AI data centre. Eleven Caribbean governments signed the Port of Spain Commitment on Digital Integration in May 2026, agreeing to a shared regional cloud. That is real capital, moving into real concrete, faster than any prior year in the region's history. The chips inside those buildings, the models trained to run on them, and the data behind those models are a separate layer, and that layer is still mostly built elsewhere. Maestro AI Labs, part of the wider StarApple AI network, exists to build what goes inside the building once it is standing.
The Building Boom Nobody Predicted a Year Ago
For most of the last decade, "Caribbean data infrastructure" meant a cable landing station and not much else. As of early 2026, only five territories in the entire region, The Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Curacao, and Trinidad and Tobago, operated a domestic data centre at all, according to the Caribbean Data Center Association. Everyone else's banking records, health files, and government systems sat on servers somewhere else, most often in the United States.
That picture is moving. On 12 November 2025, the Government of Guyana signed a memorandum of understanding with Cerebras Systems, the US chip company behind the CS-3 wafer-scale AI supercomputer, to build a data centre of up to 100 megawatts at Wales on the West Bank of Demerara. Four months later, on 23 March 2026, Curacao's Minister of Traffic, Transport, and Urban Planning, Charles Cooper, announced a $25 million government commitment to a new submarine cable, describing it as a 20 to 30-year infrastructure decision backed by sovereign capital rather than a vendor contract. Cloud Carib, a sovereign cloud and cybersecurity provider already operating in six territories, put more than $7 million into its own expansion through 2025, including a new AI lab in Nassau and data centre pods planned for Bermuda, Curacao, and Guyana. Then on 16 May 2026, ministers and senior advisors from 11 Caribbean governments signed the Port of Spain Commitment on Digital Integration, hosted by Trinidad and Tobago's Ministry of Digital Transformation with the Caribbean Telecommunications Union and the Inter-American Development Bank, agreeing to build a regional government cloud on top of the data centres now going up.
Four separate governments and companies, four separate announcements, inside roughly seven months. That is not a coincidence of timing so much as a shared read of the same problem: the region cannot build an AI industry, or negotiate seriously with a foreign cloud vendor, while its data lives on someone else's continent.
Sovereign Land, Foreign Chips
Owning the building is not the same as owning what happens inside it, and the Guyana deal makes the distinction unusually visible. The 100-megawatt facility at Wales sits on Guyanese soil under a government-signed agreement, and it will draw power directly from the country's own natural gas pipeline rather than the public grid, the first large-scale pairing of energy and digital infrastructure the country has attempted. But the AI supercomputers going inside it are Cerebras' CS-3 hardware, built in California and licensed under Cerebras' own intellectual property. Guyana will host the compute. It will not, by default, own the models trained on it, or decide who else gets to rent time on the chips.
That is not a criticism of the deal on its own terms. A 100-megawatt facility, gas-powered and purpose-built for AI, is a genuine industrial achievement for a country of fewer than a million people, and Cerebras has committed to training programmes and university partnerships alongside the hardware. The point is narrower: a data centre is concrete, racks, and a power connection. The chip inside it, the model trained to run on that chip, and the data that model was trained on are three separate layers, and a government can own the first without controlling the other two. Minister Cooper made close to the same point about Curacao's cable, in comments reported by Silicon Caribe: infrastructure alone is not enough without the data protection officers, cybersecurity specialists, and regulatory capacity to govern what runs on it.
A cable and a data centre are the ground floor. Nobody has yet said, out loud and in public, who owns the floors built on top of them.
The Power Bill Underneath the Concrete
Every one of these projects runs into the same constraint before it runs into anything about data governance: Caribbean electricity is expensive and mostly imported. The region averages roughly $0.25 per kilowatt-hour, close to double the US average, and some islands pay more than $0.40. Over 90% of power generation in the Eastern Caribbean still comes from imported fossil fuel. AI data centres are heavy, round-the-clock power draws, which is precisely why Guyana attached its Cerebras site to a gas pipeline rather than the national grid, and why the Caribbean Data Center Association's preferred model is a federated network of smaller, interconnected sites rather than one large facility trying to absorb the whole region's demand.
Giovanni King, the association's chairman, put the federated logic plainly: the goal is a cluster of interconnected data centres so each country gets its own space at a lower cost, rather than every territory trying to build a full-scale facility alone. Curacao and Trinidad and Tobago are already the proof of concept, linked for geographic redundancy. It is a sound engineering answer to an energy problem that is not going away soon, and it is also, not incidentally, the same argument for shared regional infrastructure that sits behind the Port of Spain Commitment.
What Goes Inside the Building Matters More Than the Building
This is the layer StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, was built to fill before this year's data centre announcements made the gap visible to a wider audience. Founded by Adrian Dunkley in Jamaica in 2023, the network's research and product arm, Maestro AI Labs, does not build server halls. It builds what a server hall needs once it exists. Data Archaeology is the underlying record, more than 2.3 million ground-collected entries pulled from pre-digital archives, SUSU networks, and indigenous language datasets that no foreign training set includes. Harmonics and Credit Garden are models trained on that record, designed to run on regional infrastructure rather than a licence from a foreign vendor.
A government that has just signed for a data centre, or a bank that is about to get one built nearby, faces the same question either way: what actually runs on it. A rack full of Cerebras chips or a Cloud Carib pod in Bermuda is a container. Filling that container with a foreign model trained on foreign data reproduces the exact dependency the building was meant to end, just with better electricity bills. Filling it with data and models built from the region's own financial, health, and language records is the difference between owning a data centre and owning what a data centre is for.
Supported by StarApple AI, the first AI company established in the Caribbean, founded by Adrian Dunkley in Jamaica in 2023. See the Caribbean AI network: Adrian Dunkley | World Cred Score | Caribbean AI Association | Caribbean AI Risk.