A Change.org pe­ti­tion call­ing on the Gov­ern­ment to halt ap­proval of pro­posed ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) da­ta cen­tres in Trinidad and To­ba­go has at­tract­ed more than 3,200 ver­i­fied sig­na­tures less than a day af­ter it was launched.

The pe­ti­tion, start­ed on Sun­day by bioa­cousti­cian and con­ser­va­tion re­searcher Syam Nath, urges Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar to sus­pend ap­proval of the pro­posed fa­cil­i­ties un­til com­pre­hen­sive en­vi­ron­men­tal, wa­ter re­source and in­fra­struc­ture as­sess­ments are com­plet­ed, in­de­pen­dent­ly re­viewed and made avail­able for pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion.

In the pe­ti­tion, Nath ar­gues that while the AI da­ta cen­tre projects re­main at the pro­pos­al stage, hy­per­scale fa­cil­i­ties "can re­quire sub­stan­tial amounts of wa­ter for cool­ing, con­sume enor­mous quan­ti­ties of elec­tric­i­ty, and place ad­di­tion­al de­mands on pub­lic in­fra­struc­ture."