A landlocked country of roughly 3 million people is quietly becoming one of the most significant locations for American AI compute outside the US itself.
Armenia now hosts two operational AI data center facilities built around NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell GPUs, with billions of dollars in planned expansion that could make the country a serious node in the global AI infrastructure map by the end of 2027.
The Firebird bet
The larger of the two projects belongs to Firebird AI, an American company that launched its flagship facility in the city of Hrazdan in August 2026. The initial deployment: 6,144 NVIDIA B200 GPUs drawing 15 megawatts of power.
Firebird’s roadmap calls for scaling to more than 70,000 advanced NVIDIA chips and 300 MW of capacity by the end of 2027.
Firebird initially committed $500 million in 2025, then expanded that figure to $4 billion in February 2026. That announcement coincided with a visit from US Vice President JD Vance.
A 2025 US-Armenia memorandum on semiconductors and AI laid the legal and diplomatic groundwork, and US export licenses were secured to allow advanced NVIDIA hardware to be shipped into the country.
Firebird has structured the deal to share the wealth locally. Twenty percent of the facility’s computational resources are reserved for Armenian domestic use: government agencies, research institutions, and local startups. The remaining 80% will serve international clients, including prominent US firms.
A second facility enters the picture
Eleveight AI opened a separate facility in the town of Gagarin in June 2026, deploying 512 NVIDIA Blackwell B300 GPUs at launch. The company plans to scale that site to 40 MW of total capacity.
Armenia has a deep bench of engineering talent, rooted in a Soviet-era electronics and semiconductor tradition. It also sits on abundant hydropower resources, which matter enormously when your business model requires keeping thousands of GPUs running around the clock.
Geopolitics as infrastructure strategy
The US-Armenia semiconductor memorandum is linked to a peace framework with Azerbaijan that the Trump administration has endorsed. In other words, AI data centers are being woven into a diplomatic architecture designed to stabilize the South Caucasus region.
Still, challenges remain. Data centers at this scale consume enormous amounts of water for cooling, and Armenia’s water resources, while significant, aren’t infinite. Scaling from 15 MW to 300 MW in roughly 18 months is an extraordinarily aggressive timeline that will test local infrastructure, supply chains, and regulatory capacity.
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