Firebird opens Armenia AI factory with NVIDIA and CoreWeave backing
Firebird has officially inaugurated its AI factory in Hrazdan, Armenia, describing it as the largest NVIDIA DSX AI factory in the CIS region. The launch, attended by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, and Dell Technologies chairman Michael Dell, also brought announcements of fresh investment from NVIDIA, following an earlier investment by GPU cloud provider CoreWeave earlier in 2026.
The facility is built using NVIDIA's DSX AI Factory reference design, interconnected with NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking. According to the company, this architecture is designed to accommodate up to 40% more GPUs within the same physical footprint, improving power utilisation per megawatt. Firebird's roadmap calls for the Armenian site to scale beyond 70,000 NVIDIA Rubin and Blackwell GPUs by end of 2027, reaching 300 megawatts of capacity at that location alone.
Global expansion and deal terms
Firebird's ambitions extend well beyond Armenia. The company has confirmed Kazakhstan as its second market, where it has secured 125 megawatts of capacity at Data Center Valley. Critically, Firebird says it has obtained export authorisation from the US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) for that deployment, a notable development given the tightened US export controls on advanced GPU hardware to a range of non-allied markets in recent years.
The company is targeting two gigawatts of aggregate AI infrastructure capacity across Armenia, Kazakhstan and additional undisclosed frontier markets by the end of 2028. Co-founder and CEO Razmig Hovaghimian said the company combines "US regulatory expertise" with deep NVIDIA partnerships as a differentiator, positioning Firebird as a trusted intermediary for countries seeking sovereign AI infrastructure that carries US regulatory clearance.
Perplexity, the AI-native answer-engine company, has been announced as one of Firebird's first customers and will use the Armenian infrastructure to support its platform workloads.
Market context and competitive positioning
The sovereign AI infrastructure market has gained significant momentum over the past 18 months, driven by governments in the Middle East, Central Asia and Eastern Europe seeking to build domestic compute capacity rather than rely solely on hyperscaler clouds. Firebird enters a space where competitors include G42 in the UAE, Saudi Aramco-backed projects in the Kingdom, and several European national AI initiatives backed by public funds.
What distinguishes Firebird's model is its reliance on the NVIDIA DSX reference architecture and its ability to obtain BIS export licences for markets that might otherwise struggle to procure cutting-edge accelerators. The BIS authorisation for Kazakhstan is particularly significant: advanced GPU exports to Central Asian jurisdictions have attracted regulatory scrutiny amid concerns about re-export to restricted parties, and a clean licence signal will be closely watched by other operators considering similar deployments.
Jensen Huang framed the project in explicitly national-interest terms, describing AI factories as "the infrastructure nations need to create intelligence, drive economic growth and compete in the age of AI." That framing aligns with the broader NVIDIA strategy of cultivating sovereign-AI partnerships as a demand driver for its next-generation Rubin and Blackwell platforms, which face intense competition from AMD's Instinct line and, at the custom-silicon level, from AWS Trainium and Google TPUs.
Regulatory read-across
The Armenian launch coincides with the one-year anniversary of a US-Armenia Memorandum of Understanding on AI and technology cooperation signed during the Trump administration, lending the project a degree of diplomatic weight. For European regulatory observers, a facility Firebird describes as potentially among Europe's largest AI computing platforms will eventually attract scrutiny under emerging EU frameworks on critical digital infrastructure, even if Armenia itself sits outside the EU.
Firebird has not disclosed the total capital raised to date, the valuation implied by the NVIDIA investment, or the financial terms of the Perplexity customer agreement. Investors and industry observers will be looking for revenue and utilisation disclosures as the platform scales toward its 2 GW target.