Firebird launches largest AI factory in Commonwealth of Independent States region in Armenia with 70000 processing units and 300 megawatts of computing power
Listen to this article
Read by Anchor
Firebird, the emerging provider of cloud computing specialized in artificial intelligence, announced the launch of the largest AI factory in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region in Armenia, a step that places the South Caucasus on the global AI infrastructure map. The opening was attended by Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Kazakhstan's Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, and the U.S. diplomatic representative in Armenia David Allen, underscoring the project's geopolitical significance.
The factory, built on the NVIDIA DSX platform and deployed on Dell PowerEdge servers, aims to install more than 70,000 graphics processing units from the upcoming Blackwell and Rubin architectures, with a total power capacity of 300 megawatts by the end of 2027. This scale places the facility among the largest AI-dedicated computing clusters worldwide, exceeding the capabilities currently available in most countries of the region.
Co-founder Alexander Yesayan explained that the company's ambition extends to roughly 2 gigawatts of capacity worldwide over the next two years, with an explicit focus on frontier markets, a term that refers to technically developing countries that have energy and talent but lack large-scale computing infrastructure. Armenia, with its strong engineering talent and competitive energy costs, serves as an ideal testbed for this model.
What this means for developers and decision-makers in the Gulf:The race for AI Factories is no longer confined to Silicon Valley or Beijing. Countries the size of Armenia (about 3 million people) are now building computing capacity that rivals what major economies plan. Saudi Arabia (through Sadara and HUMAIN), the United Arab Emirates (through G42 and the AI Council), and Qatar (through the Cloud Computing Research Center) are watching this model closely: how a state with limited energy resources and talent can turn them into AI exports?
The partnership with Perplexity to access the infrastructure, and the announced investment from NVIDIA (following a prior investment from CoreWeave), confirm that the economic model relies on converting energy into tokens with the highest possible efficiency: 40 % more processing units per same footprint thanks to the DSX platform.
Takeaway:Firebird's factory in Hrazdan is not merely a server site, but a replicable model: a mid-size country, available energy, engineering talent, and a partnership with major compute providers. The Arab region, with its energy wealth and sovereign ambitions, possesses all the ingredients to replicate this model, and even surpass it.