Stargates: What is known about the $500 million supercomputer megaproject planned in Armenia?

At the Paris arena of Europe’s largest startup and technology conference, Viva Technology, news was announced that could change the technological map of the region: Armenia is launching a megaproject worth around $500 million. The country will establish the most powerful supercomputer and AI-driven data center in the region — a scale the South Caucasus has never seen before.

The project is backed by a coalition of the Armenian government, global giant NVIDIA, the innovation company Firebird (San Francisco and Yerevan), and telecom operator Team Group. Among the investors is the fund of Noubar Afeyan, the legendary entrepreneur of Armenian origin who has invested billions in global biotech and technological innovations.

A Window of Opportunity Not to Be Missed

According to Rev Lebaredian, NVIDIA’s Vice President for Omniverse and Simulation Technologies, the supercomputer being created in Armenia will not simply be an infrastructure facility, but a true generator of new ideas and research. These studies will evolve into startups and then into companies, forming a significant part of the economy and elevating Armenia to the level of a notable player on the global technology stage.

He emphasized that without advanced technologies, it is impossible to build a strong economy, and without a strong economy, the country will not be of interest to other states. This means its security would also be at risk. Therefore, the project is not merely about investment or new jobs. It is a strategic step.

“Today we are in a unique window of opportunity. In the coming years, such infrastructure will appear in many countries and will become as essential as electricity. Our task is to seize this moment to create startups and research in Armenia that, if implemented correctly, could generate tens of billions of dollars,” Lebaredian stressed on the “Re:arrange” podcast.

What is being built in Armenia today can be described as true “artificial intelligence factories.” According to him, an AI factory is a large machine that takes in energy and raw materials and produces a high value-added product at the output. Ordinary data centers are organized differently: they only store and transmit data, and companies usually try to minimize the cost of maintaining them. But “AI factories” operate under a different logic. Two resources are supplied at the input — energy and data — and the output is a new product: intelligence, expressed in tokens. Essentially, it is the transformation of information into value.

The efficiency of such “factories” is measured by the number of tokens produced from the same amount of energy and data. The higher the productivity, the more value is created. The particular significance of this approach lies in the fact that it offers a solution for countries with surplus electricity. Traditional export requires networks, transmission lines, and is always tied to losses and geopolitical risks. But if energy is transformed into tokens — the digital form of intelligence — it can be stored and transmitted over the internet with virtually no loss or restriction.

For Armenia, this opens up unique prospects. With a population of only 3 million, the country has a nuclear reactor, hydroelectric plants, and rapidly developing solar energy. Exporting excess electricity in traditional ways is difficult, but converting it into intelligence is a real alternative. This is not just a technological solution but a new economic model in which energy is transformed into a global digital product.

Armenia — The First Step

Alexander Yesayan, co-founder of Team Group and Firebird, emphasized that new artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT or AI agents, will radically transform many areas in the coming years.

“Take call centers. Already today AI can answer 90%, and sometimes all, customer inquiries. This means that in telecom companies, banks, or any other sectors, virtual agents will appear, performing the functions of an entire army of employees. If we can act quickly and smartly enough, we won’t just have 3 million people but, figuratively speaking, 30 million virtual agents working for us, creating added value and bringing money into the economy. These services could be sold worldwide,” he noted.

According to Yesayan, this AI factory will have several key roles. The first is research: the ability to come up with new ideas, like ChatGPT, and turn them into world-class companies. The second is service-based. On the foundation of AI factories, entire services and platforms can be launched. Every time a user interacts with a virtual agent, computations take place inside this center, generating value in the form of those very tokens.

The third direction is physical labor, when AI goes beyond virtual agents and manages robots performing real tasks in the physical world.

Yesayan also clarified that the project is being developed under Firebird, a company founded in the United States, but the first step is being taken in Armenia. In the current phase, the data center will be equipped with 5,000 GPUs, and by next year their number will grow to 15,000. But the plans do not stop there: in the future, Firebird intends to build several such centers in different countries to provide global access to computing power.

“We are starting with Armenia, but Firebird’s goal is to become an international player in creating AI factories,” he stressed.