Pashinyan has clear public mandate to establish peace with Azerbaijan: spokesperson tells WSJ

Establishing peace with Azerbaijan has been “the most important promise” of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government, and he has a “clear mandate from the people” to do so, Pashinyan’s spokesperson Melania Harutyunyan told The Wall Street Journal.

Harutyunyan’s comments were included in the newspaper’s report on the role of U.S. economic and technological proposals in the process of reaching a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The bilateral agreements signed in Washington last August, “including the MOU on semiconductors and artificial intelligence, represent important peace dividends offered to Armenia,” she said.

The Wall Street Journal, citing people involved in the negotiations, wrote in a piece titled U.S. Used Promise of Nvidia Chips to Broker Armenia-Azerbaijan Peace Deal that U.S. negotiators used the promise of expanded access for Armenia to Nvidia’s leading-edge artificial-intelligence chips as an economic inducement to help secure a preliminary peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The newspaper presented this approach as one of the most striking examples to date of what the U.S. administration calls “chip diplomacy.” While technology offers have been used in dealings with other countries to reach economic agreements, in Armenia’s case, according to the report, they also served to advance the peace process.

The reference is specifically to export licenses for Nvidia’s leading-edge chips for the Firebird artificial-intelligence data center in Hrazdan. The project’s total cost, according to the newspaper, could exceed $5 billion. The center is planned to be equipped with around 70,000 Nvidia servers featuring Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin technology.

At the opening of Firebird, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called it a major achievement and highlighted the role of U.S. President Donald Trump, recalling the memorandum signed last year that expanded cooperation between Armenia and the United States in technology and trade.

According to the WSJ, the U.S. negotiating team believed that the peace process could be strengthened if Armenia were offered closer economic ties with the United States and access to advanced technologies.

The newspaper also cited a document dated June 2025 produced by the team of U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff. It outlined plans, as part of the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, to deepen Armenia’s economic relationship with the United States, support Armenia’s technology sector and provide export licenses for the chips needed for the Firebird project.

Firebird had initially applied for an export license for around 6,000 graphics processing units (GPUs). According to the WSJ, after the preliminary agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan was reached, the U.S. side agreed to authorize the delivery of tens of thousands more of Nvidia’s leading-edge processors, known as GB300s.