The future has an address
Notes from the opening of Firebird's first AI factory in Hrazdan, Armenia. DC-1 starts with 6,144 liquid-cooled NVIDIA B200 GPUs and a roadmap that runs to 400 MW, and the reason it is there has less to do with software than with electricity, ground and fibre.
The sign at the entrance said the future has an address. Today that address is Hrazdan.
Our SkyTel team, along with several guests we brought with us, was at the opening of Firebird’s first AI factory in Armenia. DC-1 starts with 6,144 liquid-cooled NVIDIA B200 GPUs, built in a little over six months.
The interesting numbers are the next ones. DC-2 in Hrazdan is planned at 75,000 NVIDIA VR200 GPUs and 280 MW, on a campus meant to reach 400 MW. DC-3 in Kazakhstan is already on the list at 75,000 GB300 GPUs and 250 MW. Firebird’s own site sums the platform up as three purpose-built data centres, 150,000 GPUs and 400 MW. NVIDIA, which has announced it will invest, describes more than 70,000 Blackwell and Rubin GPUs and 300 MW in Armenia by the end of 2027, and a longer roadmap of roughly 2 GW across Armenia, Kazakhstan and other markets. Phase one alone was around $500 million and needed a U.S. export licence for the hardware.
So what opened is the small part.
The flagship site as Firebird shows it. Photo: Firebird.
I look at this from underneath, because that is where my industry sits. Power, compute and networks used to be three separate conversations with three separate vendors. At this scale they are one system. Tens of thousands of GPUs cannot work as an island: they need enormous bandwidth inside the building, high-capacity access for customers, and international routes that stay up. When the network degrades, compute becomes unavailable, whatever the utilisation dashboard says. We spent years connecting people, then offices, then data centres and clouds. AI factories are the next class of thing our networks have to serve, and by far the heaviest.
DC-1, the building that opened.
The location is what I keep coming back to. Hrazdan is not Frankfurt or Northern Virginia. It is a town in Armenia with power, land and a thermal plant that has been generating since the 1960s. Electricity, ground, connectivity, engineers, capital and permission to buy the chips: that combination is what decides where this industry lands. The map is still being drawn, and this time our region is on it.
Firebird AI Factory grand opening.
I would not measure Firebird by GPU count, though. The hard questions start after the ribbon. Utilisation. International demand. Power economics. And whether local companies, universities and engineers turn access to this compute into something of their own. A country can host a data centre without building a technology industry around it. NVIDIA and CoreWeave have invested, Perplexity is already using the capacity, and Armenia says it will open resources to local startups and researchers. That last part is the one worth watching.
Before the ceremony.
Twenty-five years ago the strategic infrastructure was fibre. Then data centres. Then cloud regions. Now it is power and compute, and the cycle is faster than any of them: DC-1 opened on B200 while the next phase is already specified on VR200.
6,144 GPUs started running in Hrazdan today. That is a real marker on the map, and it is close to home.
Hrazdan thermal power plant, in the same town.
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