Firebird opens region’s largest AI factory in Armenia, plans major global expansion

(Horizon Media / YEREVAN) — Firebird has officially launched a major NVIDIA-powered artificial intelligence computing centre near Hrazdan, placing Armenia at the centre of an ambitious effort to build large-scale AI infrastructure across emerging markets.

NVIDIA described the newly operational facility as the largest AI factory in the CIS region. Built around NVIDIA’s DSX architecture and Dell Technologies infrastructure, the centre is designed to provide the computing power required to train, fine-tune and run increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence models.

The August 8 inauguration brought together senior government officials and representatives from the international technology sector, including NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang, NVIDIA Vice President Rev Lebaredian, Firebird co-founders Razmig Hovaghimian and Alexander Yesayan, U.S. Embassy Chargé d’Affaires David Allen and Kazakhstan Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev.

The opening comes exactly one year after Armenia and the United States signed a memorandum on artificial intelligence and semiconductor cooperation in Washington on August 8, 2025. The agreement formed part of a broader effort to deepen bilateral cooperation in advanced technology and strengthen Armenia’s access to the rapidly developing global AI industry.

The first phase of the Firebird project represents approximately $500 million in investment. The facility, constructed on a roughly 200,000-square-metre site near Hrazdan, is expected to operate with more than 6,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and approximately 18 megawatts of capacity.

The project is intended to provide Armenian companies, researchers and universities with access to high-performance computing resources that would otherwise generally have to be sourced abroad, while also attracting international AI companies to Armenia.

The Armenian government has entered into a significant partnership with Firebird. In April, the Ministry of High-Tech Industry signed an agreement to acquire $25 million worth of high-performance computing resources, which are expected to be made available to Armenian researchers, scientists, educational institutions, AI specialists and startups.

Firebird is already planning a much larger expansion. The company says its Armenian operation is expected to grow to more than 70,000 NVIDIA Blackwell and next-generation Rubin GPUs and 300 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027, a scale that would place the project among Europe’s largest AI infrastructure platforms.

Official projections envision later phases potentially exceeding 100,000 Blackwell and Vera Rubin GPUs and 400 megawatts of total capacity, with cumulative investment rising above $4 billion. The project’s expansion has also been facilitated by U.S. authorization for the export of tens of thousands of advanced NVIDIA processors to Armenia.

The project carries an increasingly international dimension. Firebird announced that NVIDIA intends to invest in the company, following an earlier investment by U.S.-based AI cloud provider CoreWeave. No value was disclosed for NVIDIA’s planned investment.

Firebird is simultaneously expanding into Kazakhstan, where it says it has secured 125 megawatts of capacity at Data Center Valley with Kazakh government approval and U.S. export authorization. The company ultimately aims to develop approximately two gigawatts of AI infrastructure across Armenia, Kazakhstan and other markets by the end of 2028.

In another sign that the Hrazdan facility is intended to serve international technology companies rather than solely Armenia’s domestic market, Firebird announced AI search company Perplexity as one of its first customers. Perplexity is expected to use computing capacity supplied through Firebird for its AI answer engine and other artificial intelligence products.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said the development of local AI infrastructure could give Armenian researchers, startups and industries the computing foundation needed to build artificial intelligence products domestically while attracting international companies to the country.

The launch represents a significant expansion of Armenia’s longstanding technology sector beyond software development and engineering talent into the capital-intensive field of advanced computing infrastructure. If Firebird’s planned expansion is fully implemented, Armenia would host computing capacity on a scale unusual for a country of its size and could become an important regional location for AI research, cloud computing and the deployment of advanced artificial intelligence systems.