Firebird Opens Armenia AI Factory With 6,144 NVIDIA GPUs in Strategic US-Backed CIS Expansion

Firebird Launches CIS Region's Largest AI Factory in Armenia

Firebird, NVIDIA, Dell Technologies, CoreWeave and regional leaders mark a milestone in building AI infrastructure to support economic growth, scientific research and technological advancements. The global buildout of AI infrastructure reached a new milestone today -- Firebird, an emerging AI cloud, launched the CIS region's largest AI factory in Armenia, establishing a new AI computing hub powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing and Dell Technologies high-performance AI infrastructure. Nikol Pashinyan, prime minister of the Republic of Armenia; Zhaslan Madiyev, deputy prime minister of the Republic of Kazakhstan; and David Allen, U.S. chargé d'affaires, a.i. in Armenia, attended the AI factory opening ceremony. AI factories are the foundational infrastructure for the AI era, providing the computing capacity needed to train, fine-tune and deploy AI models for every domain at scale. Building the Infrastructure to Create Intelligence at Home While AI services are available globally, countries also need the capacity to develop and run AI for their own languages, industries and national priorities. Firebird's AI factory brings that capacity to Armenia, giving developers, startups, enterprises, universities and public institutions the compute to build and scale AI at home. Firebird plans to deploy more than 70,000 NVIDIA Rubin and Blackwell GPUs and 300 megawatts of AI infrastructure capacity in Armenia by the end of 2027, accelerating the country's development as a center for AI research, advanced computing and innovation. At this scale, energy efficiency is essential. Built on the NVIDIA DSX platform, this AI factory integrates accelerated computing, networking, power and cooling as one codesigned system. Firebird's AI factory is designed from the ground up to turn compute into revenue. With DSX, it can run up to 40% more GPUs on the same footprint, producing more tokens per dollar and extracting more value from every megawatt of capacity. A Magnet for Global AI, a Catalyst for Local Innovation Firebird's ambitions extend beyond a single site. With NVIDIA's support, the company is pursuing an approximately 2-gigawatt AI infrastructure roadmap spanning Armenia, Kazakhstan and additional markets. Firebird also announced that NVIDIA intends to invest in the company, following an earlier investment by CoreWeave this year. These investments will help Firebird expand its global infrastructure and operational footprint, and support its efforts to establish the largest and most advanced compute clusters across frontier markets. Delivered in just over six months, the Armenia AI factory demonstrates Firebird's ability to turn ambitious infrastructure plans into operational AI capacity with exceptional speed. Schneider Electric provides the power infrastructure supporting Firebird's AI factory in Hrazdan, helping Firebird meet its accelerated deployment schedule by rapidly delivering and setting up critical systems, including medium- and low-voltage switchgear, three-phase uninterruptible power supply systems and rack enclosures. This keeps the power buildout moving at the pace of the compute and provides a reliable foundation to bring NVIDIA accelerated computing online at scale. To support the facility's thermal needs, Vertiv provided a cooling architecture combining chilled-water technology, advanced controls and Vertiv TrimCooler technology for efficient heat rejection. Vertiv's iCOM CWM Chilled Water Manager centrally coordinates cooling resources, improving visibility, efficiency and responsiveness as demand shifts with AI workloads. Early demand is coming from AI-native companies including Perplexity, which is working with Firebird to access high-performance AI infrastructure for its AI agent platform and answer engine. As AI becomes essential infrastructure worldwide, Firebird's expansion can help make the CIS region a magnet for global companies building and running AI -- and a catalyst for local developers, researchers and enterprises. Powered by NVIDIA's total AI factory platform -- reference architecture, accelerated computing, networking and AI software -- and deployed on Dell PowerEdge servers, the new Firebird AI factory will help Armenia's builders turn energy into intelligence and connect their innovations to the global AI economy.

Armenia's new AI factory is a US export licence made physical

Firebird's Hrazdan site went live on Saturday with Kazakhstan's deputy prime minister in the room. The GPU count is the least interesting number in the announcement. Firebird, a US-based AI cloud company, opened what NVIDIA calls the CIS region's largest AI factory in Hrazdan, Armenia on Saturday. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan attended, alongside Kazakhstan's deputy prime minister Zhaslan Madiyev and David Allen, the US chargé d'affaires in Armenia. That guest list is the story. A US company opened a facility in a country inside Russia's traditional sphere of influence, with an American diplomat and a Kazakh minister watching. The licence is the load-bearing fact None of this happens without export approval. Firebird secured a US export licence in November 2025, the regulatory step that allowed advanced NVIDIA hardware into Armenia at all. The politics were made explicit in February. Firebird and the US government jointly announced Phase 2 at a Yerevan press conference during Vice President JD Vance's visit, scaling the project to $4 billion and roughly 50,000 GPUs with licensing for a further 41,000 NVIDIA GB300 units. Phase One was $500 million. The announcement claimed Armenia would host one of the world's five largest AI GPU clusters. What is actually running The opened flagship, DC-1, is specified at 6,144 NVIDIA B200 GPUs across 15 megawatts, liquid-cooled and built on NVIDIA's reference architecture. The target is more than 70,000 Rubin and Blackwell GPUs and 300 megawatts by the end of 2027. That is a twentyfold increase in power capacity in roughly 17 months. A planned DC-2 is listed at 75,000 VR200 GPUs across 125 megawatts, with a third site at similar scale. The delivery speed is genuinely notable. NVIDIA says the site went from plan to operating capacity in just over six months, with Schneider Electric supplying switchgear, three-phase UPS systems and rack enclosures, and Vertiv providing chilled-water cooling. The power trick The facility runs on NVIDIA's DSX platform, which codesigns compute, networking, power and cooling as a single system rather than separate procurements. NVIDIA claims it allows up to 40% more GPUs on the same footprint by recovering stranded power. For a site scaling from 15 to 300 megawatts, that coordination is where the capacity maths gets made. It is also, in NVIDIA's own framing, a tokens-per-dollar argument rather than a performance one. Who is paying for it Firebird said NVIDIA intends to invest in the company, following an earlier CoreWeave investment this year. The pattern is familiar: NVIDIA takes a position in a company that then buys NVIDIA hardware at scale. NVIDIA has now committed more than $40 billion to AI equity positions in 2026, and the structures have grown more creative. It took a $2.1 billion warrant in IREN as part of a five-gigawatt data centre deal. The same logic runs through its sovereign deals. NVIDIA invested $1 billion in Naver while striking a $500 billion arrangement with SK Group, an approach critics have labelled circular financing. The neocloud playbook Firebird fits a category that barely existed three years ago: companies that buy GPUs at scale and rent them to model builders. CoreWeave, an early Firebird backer, has signed a multi-year deal with Anthropic to run Claude at production scale. Europe has its own version. Nscale committed €695 million to Portugal with Microsoft, reaching a $14.6 billion valuation in two years, on much the same thesis about sovereign capacity. Firebird's first named customer is Perplexity, which is using the site for its answer engine and AI agent platform. Where this goes next Firebird is pursuing an approximately two-gigawatt roadmap spanning Armenia, Kazakhstan and further markets, which explains why a Kazakh deputy prime minister was at an Armenian ribbon-cutting. The strategic logic is straightforward. Compute is becoming the thing countries align around, and the United States has found a way to place it in a region where its influence has historically been thin. The open question is demand. Building 300 megawatts in the Caucasus assumes customers will route workloads there rather than to cheaper or closer capacity, and one answer engine does not settle that.