Firebird opens region’s largest AI data centre in Armenia

Firebird officially opened the largest artificial intelligence data centre in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region on 8 August 2026, marking the multibillion-dollar project that Armenian officials say will position the country as a strategic hub in the global AI economy.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, NVIDIA Vice President Rev Lebaredian, Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, and US Chargé d’Affaires David Allen attended the ceremony in Hrazdan, along with foreign ambassadors, investors, and officials.

‘Today Armenia and Kazakhstan are building their own infrastructure to build their own intelligence at home’, said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang in a video statement addressed to the guests attending the launch.

The facility represents the first phase of a project Firebird says will eventually deploy more than 70,000 NVIDIA Blackwell and Vera Rubin graphics processing units (GPUs) and reach 300 megawatts of computing capacity by the end of 2027. According to the company, this scale would rank the centre among Europe’s largest AI infrastructure platforms.

Pashinyan linked the opening to Armenia’s deepening ties with Washington.

‘Exactly one year after signing the US–Armenia Memorandum of Understanding on AI and technology cooperation with President Donald Trump, we are now seeing this major achievement’, he said.

NVIDIA has announced plans to invest directly in Firebird, following an earlier investment from CoreWeave. Meanwhile, Dell Technologies will supply the servers that will power the facility. The company Perplexity has been named as one of the Firebird’s first customers, using the infrastructure to power its AI answer engine. Hrazdan Mayor Sevak Mikayelyan called it ‘an important and historic day’ for the city, adding that the project would put Hrazdan ‘on the global technology map’.

The project has been backed by major investments from six financial institutions. In March, they announced the signing of ‘the first syndicated loan agreement in the history of Armenia’s banking system’, roughly $300 million.

A syndicated loan is usually offered by a group of lenders — in this case Ardshinbank, Acba Bank, Evocabank, Fast Bank, C-Quadrat Ampega Asset Management Armenia Fund, and Amundi-Acba Asset Management Fund — who work together to provide credit to a large borrower. Each of the banks contributes a certain amount to the loan and shares the risk. This, along with billions of direct investments from Firebird and its partners, is meant to fund the data centre’s construction.

The total investment in all of the phases of the project is estimated to reach $5 billion, and Firebird says the complete campus will eventually employ 300 people. Part of Firebird’s computing capacity will be reserved for Armenian universities, startups, and government-supported research programmes.

However, although the project is estimated to have a positive impact on the country’s economy and establish Armenia as a player in the AI industry, public discussion in Armenia has raised questions about its potential environmental impact on the country’s water resources and the ability of the power grid to support the work of the data centre.

In an interview with Hetq, Firebird co-founder Alexander Yesayan addressed the criticism about the data centre’s impact on Armenia’s energy capacity. He claimed that it is a problem that the country often produces more electricity than it can consume. In his words, the centre is even ‘a rescue’ for the industry, helping to utilise the surplus that would otherwise be wasted.

However, in June, Pashinyan himself informed the parliament that the country no longer had the power surplus it had a year earlier. This means that the project’s full capacity will depend on the new generation and storage capacity that is still under construction.

Another major concern is how much additional pressure the water facility would put on the country, which already faces water scarcity. In the same interview, Yesayan said that the Hrazdan site uses a closed-loop water cooling system that recirculates rather than discharges water.

In response to concerns on social media about water management, Hrant Khachatryan, head of the machine learning group at Yerevan State University (YSU), used the example of YSU’s small-scale data centre to illustrate that neither it nor Firebird uses drinking water for cooling purposes, but rather glycol, which can be used for several years. A mixture of glycol and purified water is the primary coolant used in closed-loop systems to efficiently remove extreme heat from high-density AI GPUs.

The company is simultaneously expanding in Kazakhstan and plans to achieve approximately two gigawatts of AI infrastructure capacity worldwide by 2028.