How Nvidia’s Armenian AI factory boosts local tech talent

Shant Shahrigian
Deutsche Welle
As costly artificial intelligence data centers get built in rich countries, there’s concern that many countries will be left behind. But Armenia is poised to get a boost from Nvidia’s plans for a $500 million AI factory.
Hankavan is about an hour’s drive from Armenia’s capital Yerevan and is known for its campgrounds. Every summer, all kinds of programs draw students here. During the last week of August, more than 100 young people came for something new: learning about career paths in artificial intelligence (AI).
A nonprofit called the Foundation for Armenian Science and Technology organized the camp as part of their efforts to get young Armenians ready for tech jobs. On the last day of the program, Armenian tech professionals sat in circles with high school students from all over the country to share advice.
One of the day’s speakers, a researcher and software engineer named Tigran Ishkhanyan, said the new AI data center will be a boon for Armenia — and for youths like the students at the camp.
“[The] Nvidia AI factory will be a game changer, for sure, because they will need a lot of professionals and, of course, first of all they will try to hire someone from Armenia,” he said.
Competitive advantage
Nvidia has announced it is partnering with a small US-based firm called Firebird and Armenia’s government to launch a $500 million AI factory next year, though the specific location of the center is yet to be announced. It is set to use thousands of microchips known as graphics processing units, or GPUs.
Rev Lebaredian, a Nvidia vice president, recently predicted that “everyone” around the world will eventually have basic infrastructure for AI.
In a podcast, he compared the technology to the advent of electricity, noting it was confined to just a few places before spreading all over. But until AI similarly becomes ubiquitous, the new data center will give Armenia a big competitive advantage, Lebaredian said.
“What we’re building with this supercomputer isn’t just another business,” he said in June. “This is going to be a generator for basic research that will then turn into companies that will grow and become a big part of the economy and turn Armenia into a significant player in technology on the global stage.”
The executive also explained how an AI factory works, saying the new facility will take in tons of data, rapidly crunch it using Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, and put out so-called tokens containing condensed information for all kinds of applications.
“The more tokens you can produce, the more efficient you are, the more value you create,” Lebaredian added.
AI’s winners and losers
As expensive AI factories get built in rich countries — with the United States, the European Union and China hosting the majority of such sites — a 2024 United Nations report has expressed growing concern that countries with fewer resources will be left behind.
Huge data centers have been powering AI research, costing billions of dollars and sparking competition to acquire GPUs. The chips are notorious for consuming huge amounts of electricity and requiring vast amounts of water to stay cool.
Experts warn that the growth of AI might create a new digital divide that repeats the inequities of colonialism.
“As the global economy increasingly shifts towards AI-driven production and innovation, less developed countries risk being left further behind, exacerbating economic and social divides,” states the UN report compiled by the Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology.
Nvidia’s plans would make Armenia— which has about 3 million residents and is still reeling from its recent wars with neighboring Azerbaijan — the only country in the region to boast an AI factory.
According to Lebaredian, the new facility will tap surplus electrical supply from the country’s only nuclear power plant.
Local tech boom
Lebaredian is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to his LinkedIn profile, as the head of Firebird. People in Armenia credit Armenian expats like them with helping to create the country’s tech sector in recent years.
Experts say another factor behind Armenia’s tech boom is simple necessity. The country is a bit smaller than Belgium and has few natural resources. That means more and more investors and educators here have been turning to tech.
There are more than 1,200 tech companies with at least three employees each in Armenia, and they had $2.3 billion in turnover last year, according to a recent study by Armenian nonprofit Bootcamps.
The figures cover a mix of homegrown businesses and local outposts of foreign firms, some of which reportedly moved here from Russia to get around Western sanctions.
Some of the future workers at Nvidia’s AI factory seem likely to come out of the afterschool programs at Armenia’s Tumo Center for Creative Technologies.
On a recent visit to Tumo’s huge headquarter in the capital Yerevan, dozens of students were spread out and either doing self-study at clusters of computers or learning from instructors in classrooms. In one room, a 12-year-old was doing a one-on-one session about robotics with a veteran educator and a mini robot rolling around a table.
Pegor Papazian, Tumo’s chief development officer, told DW that he and other tech leaders in Armenia have been involved in conversations about establishing the new AI factory.
“We were invited by the Firebird team to pitch a couple of ideas on how we would use free computing if it was available to us for educational, academic research purposes,” he said. “It looks like we will be able to benefit directly.”
Tumo has proposed projects including a study of student behavior data, in order to personalize learning paths, and a study focusing on Armenian architecture, according to Papazian.
On the last day of the Hankavan camp, the talks on AI careers lasted into the evening.
Viktoria Melkonyan, a 16-year-old who studies IT, voiced high hopes for the new factory.
“It is very surprising that they invested such big money to build servers,” she told DW. “I think this investment from Nvidia to Armenia will be a great… to show the world that Armenia is not falling behind, but we are catching up and we are also pushing others further.”