22/09/26
By AfterPost
Yerevan is building a giant artificial intelligence infrastructure that could rewrite the tech map of the South Caucasus. According to Bloomberg, the American company *Firebird AI* has officially launched a hyperscale data center in *Hrazdan*, 45 km from Yerevan, and plans to scale it into one of the largest computing clusters in Europe.
*The Project: From $500 Million to $5 Billion*
What started as a $500 million announcement in June 2025 is now a multibillion-dollar megaproject.
- *Phase 1 (LIVE):* Opened August 8, 2026, on 200,000 sqm near Hrazdan. 18 MW capacity, 6,144 Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs, 110.6 exaflops FP4 compute. Dell PowerEdge AI servers. 100 permanent jobs. First customer: Perplexity AI.
- *Phase 2-3 (By end 2027):* Expansion to *300-400 MW* and *70,000 to over 100,000 Nvidia Blackwell and next-gen Vera Rubin GPUs* (GB300 / Grace Blackwell). Total investment *$4-5 billion* — over 10% of Armenia's GDP. This would make it the largest AI cluster in the CIS region and one of the top 5 in Europe.
The complex will reserve *20% of compute for Armenia* — local startups, universities, government agencies, researchers — while *80% is for foreign clients*, mainly US AI companies.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia founder and CEO, said in a video message at the opening: "AI factories are the infrastructure nations need to create intelligence, drive economic growth and compete in the AI era."
Nvidia also announced it will directly invest in Firebird, after CoreWeave.
*Why Armenia? Chip Diplomacy and Peace Deal*
Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal reveal the project was not just commercial — it was geopolitical.
Armenia has a strong engineering base from Soviet times, when it was a center for electronics. Firebird's founders — Razmig Hovaghimian and Alexander Yesayan — are Armenian-American diaspora, linking Silicon Valley and Yerevan.
But the key enabler was Washington. For years, advanced Nvidia chips were under strict export controls to prevent diversion to Russia and Iran. Armenia got a rare *US export license for tens of thousands of Blackwell GPUs*.
According to WSJ, the license was *used as chip diplomacy* by the Trump administration to broker the historic peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. US negotiators promised to allow Nvidia exports to advance negotiations toward the Washington Peace Summit in August 2025.
PM Nikol Pashinyan credited Trump directly at the ribbon-cutting: "Exactly one year after signing the U.S.-Armenia Memorandum of Understanding on artificial intelligence and technology cooperation with President Donald Trump, we have this significant result."
The US Embassy in Yerevan called it "a tangible example of the growing partnership between the United States and Armenia."
*What It Means: Compute Sovereignty*
Armenia is not manufacturing chips — TSMC still makes Blackwell in Taiwan. Armenia is doing something else: *compute sovereignty*.
Instead of competing with AWS and Azure, Firebird is targeting frontier markets where demand for sovereign, locally accessible compute is outpacing supply. The Hrazdan AI Factory positions Armenia as a regional AI gateway connecting Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle Corridor bypassing Russia.
If completed, the 300 MW campus will be larger than most AI superclusters in Germany or France. For a country of 3 million people, it would be an unprecedented leap — turning Hrazdan, a former Soviet industrial town, into a global AI factory.
Risks remain: Armenia imports 88% of its gas from Russia, power grid stability, and questions about digital sovereignty since data will sit on US-controlled Dell servers. But for now, Yerevan has pulled off the most unexpected AI play in Europe.