Hrazdan named as home for Armenia’s first data center

By Lia Avagyan

Hrazdan will host Armenia’s first data center, the industrial city’s mayor has confirmed.

In a statement on social media, Sevak Mikaelyan named his city as the home for a $500 million data center planned for next year.

“This is a unique opportunity for Armenia and Hrazdan. We are becoming a regional artificial intelligence center,” Mikaelyan wrote on Facebook this week.

The data center is a public-private partnership with AI company Firebird, which describes itself as dually based in San Francisco and Yerevan.

The U.S. government granted the startup permission to export Nvidia-made chips for the project last month.

The 100-megawatt data center plans to allocate 20% of its computing capacity for domestic use, while setting aside the other 80% for sale to U.S. companies, according to reporting by Bloomberg.

The project’s first phase is slated to come online in the second quarter of next year, according to Firebird CEO Razmig Hovaghimian.

It would be the first data center of its kind in the Caucasus region and one of the largest investments in Armenia’s modern history.

Aside from Nvidia, which already runs an office and research center in Armenia, other partners include Dell Technologies, Team Group, Armenia’s largest telecommunications company, and Noubar Afeyan, co-founder of the biotechnology firm Moderna.

Hrazdan is located in Armenia’s central Kotayk region and is home to major hydroelectric and thermal power plants that date back to Soviet times. Data centers require large amounts of power to run.