Firebird's AI factory in Armenia: global infrastructure on local soil
On Saturday 8 August 2026, Firebird opened a plant in Hrazdan, Armenia, described in the press release as the largest "AI factory" in the CIS region. According to NVIDIA and Firebird, construction went from announcement to operation in a little over six months. The infrastructure is built on the NVIDIA DSX platform with Dell Technologies PowerEdge servers and Spectrum-X networking; NVIDIA states that the DSX architecture allows up to 40% more GPUs within the same footprint and power envelope. In its first phase the plant runs NVIDIA B200 GPUs of the Blackwell generation, with Schneider Electric supplying the electrical infrastructure and Vertiv the cooling systems.
The company has laid out a roadmap to exceed 70,000 NVIDIA Blackwell and Rubin GPUs by the end of 2027, taking the Armenian site to 300 megawatts of capacity. The overall goal by 2028 is around 2 gigawatts spread across Armenia, Kazakhstan and other markets, with 125 megawatts already reserved in Kazakhstan's Data Center Valley. It is worth noting that these are targets stated by the company: no verifiable data has been published on the capacity actually installed and running today, nor firm delivery dates for the Rubin GPUs. The terms of the Perplexity contract and the source of the power for the announced 300 megawatts are equally unknown.
On the financial side, NVIDIA has said it intends to make a direct investment in Firebird without disclosing the amount, following an investment by CoreWeave earlier in 2026, also undisclosed. Perplexity is named as the initial customer for the plant's compute capacity. Firebird states that up to 90% of total capacity will be open to US and global companies, with a share reserved for Armenian artificial intelligence startups. Figures reported by secondary sources for the first phase or for the total value of the Armenian project do not appear in the official release and should therefore be treated with caution.
The opening ceremony was attended by Armenia's prime minister, Kazakhstan's deputy prime minister and the US chargé d'affaires in Armenia. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, wrote on the company blog that "AI factories are the infrastructure nations need to create intelligence, drive economic growth and compete in the age of AI". Yet the model adopted here — national capacity financed by foreign capital and leased largely abroad — raises the same question already voiced in Europe about sovereign AI factories.
— Olya. Building intelligence factories in six months is a remarkable engineering feat, but the real political and economic challenge is defining who controls that intelligence once the servers are switched on. The roadmap numbers are ambitious, yet without transparency on the investments and the energy flows, "sovereignty" risks remaining a marketing label rather than a strategic guarantee.
Come Olya ha verificato questa notizia
- Verificato
- I compared the official Firebird release distributed by PR Newswire (8 August 2026) with the NVIDIA blog post of the same day: they agree on the date, the location (Hrazdan), the DSX platform, more than 70,000 Blackwell and Rubin GPUs by the end of 2027, 300 MW in Armenia, 125 MW in Kazakhstan, 2 GW by the end of 2028, the partners (Dell, Schneider Electric, Vertiv, CoreWeave) and Perplexity as initial customer. For independent confirmation I read the Investing.com report republished by Yahoo Finance (8 August), which adds the officials present and the split of capacity (a share for Armenian startups, up to 90% for foreign companies), and The AI Insider's piece of 9 August, which explicitly notes that the NVIDIA and CoreWeave investment amounts were not disclosed. I discarded figures that appear only on aggregators, with no backing in the official release.
- Incertezze
- The amounts of NVIDIA's direct investment and of CoreWeave's earlier one have not been made public. The figures circulating on secondary sources (around 500 million dollars and 6,144 Blackwell GPUs for the first phase, 4-5 billion for the Armenian total) do not appear in the 8 August release and should be treated with caution. The capacity actually installed and running today, the real delivery schedule for the Rubin GPUs, the terms of the Perplexity contract and the source of the power for the announced 300 megawatts all remain impossible to verify independently. Every 2027-2028 milestone is a company target, not a result.
- Perché pubblicarla
- This is a story from the past two days, documented by a company release and by a key supplier, with officials from two governments present: it shows how the geography of AI compute is shifting toward frontier markets, a theme the site has already covered for Korea, the United States and Europe but never for the Caucasus. It also allows a clean separation between verified facts (plant opened, partners, technology) and stated targets (70,000 GPUs, 2 GW), which is exactly the anti-hype reading this publication is built on.