WSJ: U.S. used promise of Nvidia chips to help secure Armenia-Azerbaijan deal

By Siranush Adamyan

The United States used the prospect of giving Armenia access to advanced Nvidia artificial intelligence chips as an incentive in negotiations that led to the August 2025 Armenia-Azerbaijan agreements in Washington, The Wall Street Journal reported on September 4, citing people involved in the talks.

The report offers new details on the economic and technological incentives Washington used as it sought to move Armenia and Azerbaijan toward a settlement. It focuses in particular on Firebird, the large AI data-center project in Hrazdan that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan inaugurated last month alongside executives from Nvidia, Dell and other companies.

According to the WSJ, U.S. negotiators concluded in 2025 that Armenia would be more likely to move forward with an agreement if the peace process was accompanied by closer economic ties with the United States. One element was authorization to sell more powerful Nvidia chips to Armenia.

A spokeswoman for Pashinyan told the newspaper that peace with Azerbaijan had been the government’s “most important promise” and that the prime minister had a “clear mandate from the people” to pursue it. She described agreements signed with Washington in August 2025, including a memorandum on semiconductors and artificial intelligence, as “important peace dividends offered to Armenia.”

On August 8, 2025, Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House. Armenia and Azerbaijan initialed the text of their 17-article peace agreement and signed a joint declaration outlining further steps toward normalization. The declaration also envisaged the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP, through Armenia’s southern Syunik province. Armenia and the United States separately signed three memoranda covering connectivity, energy security, and cooperation on artificial intelligence and semiconductors. 

Also read: The White House Talks Between Armenia and Azerbaijan: Key Outcomes

The technological component centered on Firebird. The Hrazdan project is expected eventually to cost more than $5 billion, according to the WSJ. Its developers plan to install about 70,000 of Nvidia’s latest AI servers and reach roughly 300 megawatts of computing capacity by the end of 2027.

The WSJ said Firebird had initially sought a U.S. export license for about 6,000 GPUs. Only after the August 2025 Washington agreements, the newspaper reported, did U.S. officials follow through on a promise to authorize tens of thousands of additional advanced Nvidia processors.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Armenia Kristina Kvien told the WSJ that American diplomats had promoted access to advanced technology as an incentive during the negotiations. “The Nvidia piece of it was a very important piece of the puzzle,” Kvien said.

Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines, who met Pashinyan in Armenia in May 2025 alongside members of the White House negotiating team, described the chips as a significant political gain. “Getting the chips was a crucial political win,” he told the newspaper.

Firebird co-founder and CEO Razmig Hovaghimian also linked the project’s viability to regional stability. “You needed peace conditions,” he said. “The technology stack needs to be safe and secure in order to attract international customers.”

The WSJ cited a June 2025 memo prepared by U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff’s team that proposed deepening economic ties with Armenia, strengthening its technology sector and granting export licenses for Firebird as part of the broader effort to reach an Armenia-Azerbaijan agreement.

Armenia-U.S. memoranda did not mention TRIPP, which was instead set out in the trilateral declaration signed by Pashinyan, Aliyev and Trump.