Pres. Ali advances data centre, AI vision in meetings with ExxonMobil, Cerebras

In his first week since being re-elected as President of Guyana, Dr Irfaan Ali has been meeting with a number of officials from different sectors to discuss new projects and areas of collaboration.

Recently, the Head of State met with Alistair Routledge, the President of ExxonMobil Guyana, and Andrew Feldman, the CEO and Co-Founder of Cerebras, a technology company specialising in Artificial Intelligence (AI) development and training.

Discussions focused on advancing Guyana’s data centre agenda and its vision for data sovereignty, the President’s official Facebook Page noted.

President Ali also met with a team from Northwell Health led by Vice President and Founding Director of Northwell Health’s Centre for Global Health, Dr Eric Cioè-Peña.

This meeting focused on the implementation of the National Emergency Medicine Authority and on working in collaboration with ExxonMobil to establish a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Centre in Guyana.

Last month, President Ali announced that a proposal was made for Guyana’s first data centre to be developed at Wales, West Bank of Demerara.

The Head of State did not provide further details on the data centre but noted that the facility will position Guyana as a hub for healthcare provision, training, and pharmaceutical manufacturing.

The data centre is also intended to be a research institution on data analytics, artificial intelligence development and translational science.

The development comes as the country’s significant offshore gas reserves open doors to multiple industrial ventures. At the 2025 Guyana Energy Conference and Supply Chain Expo, President of ExxonMobil Guyana, Alistair Routledge, highlighted opportunities to use the resources for refining bauxite into alumina, powering data centres, and supplying energy to fertiliser plants.

Already, about 50 million cubic feet per day (mcf/d) of gas will be supplied to the mega energy project at Wales, West Bank Demerara. The gas will be transported via a pipeline from the Liza project in the Stabroek Block.

A 300-megawatt (MW) power plant is being constructed in Wales; it will use natural gas from the Stabroek Block to generate cleaner, cheaper electricity. Additionally, a Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) processing plant will treat the gas, removing liquids such as propane and butane for commercialisation.

At what ExxonMobil believes will be its eighth development, Longtail in the southeast portion of the Stabroek Block, about 1 to 1.2 billion cubic feet per day can be produced. And with that, Routledge said, comes the opportunity to pursue several ventures, be it alumina production or powering the data centres.