Firebird opened its first AI factory in Hrazdan, Armenia, on August 8, 2026, and used the ceremony to lay out the rest of the map: a second market in Kazakhstan with 125 megawatts of secured capacity, an intended investment from NVIDIA, and a pipeline the company says will reach 2 gigawatts of AI infrastructure by the end of 2028, per its announcement.
The Armenia site is the operational debut. Firebird plans to scale it beyond 70,000 NVIDIA Rubin and Blackwell GPUs and 300 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027, which the company says would place it among Europe’s largest AI infrastructure platforms. The facility is built on the NVIDIA DSX AI Factory reference design with Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, a combination Firebird says supports up to 40% more GPUs within the same footprint.
Kazakhstan is market number two. Firebird says it has secured 125 megawatts at a site called Data Center Valley, backed by approvals from the Kazakh government and an export authorization from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, the license that lets advanced NVIDIA hardware legally ship to the country. Kazakhstan’s deputy prime minister, Zhaslan Madiyev, attended the Hrazdan opening alongside Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, and the U.S. Embassy’s chargé d’affaires.
Firebird also said NVIDIA intends to invest in the company, following an earlier CoreWeave investment in 2026. Perplexity is one of the facility’s first customers, tapping the cluster for its answer engine and its AI-powered digital coworker platform.
“Within two years, we expect our global AI infrastructure platform to reach about 2 GWs of capacity, enabling frontier markets to participate directly in the global AI economy,” said Razmig Hovaghimian, Firebird’s co-founder and CEO, in the company’s announcement.
The headline figures, as Firebird states them:
- 70,000+ NVIDIA Rubin and Blackwell GPUs planned in Armenia by end of 2027
- 300 MW of Armenian AI infrastructure capacity targeted on the same timeline
- 125 MW secured in Kazakhstan at Data Center Valley
- 2 GW global pipeline targeted by end of 2028 across Armenia, Kazakhstan, and additional markets
- Up to 40% more GPUs within the same footprint under the DSX design
Why the DSX design is doing the heavy lifting
The 40% density claim comes from NVIDIA’s DSX playbook rather than from Firebird’s construction crew. Per NVIDIA’s DSX platform documentation, the reference design co-designs compute, networking, power, and cooling as one system, and its MaxLPS software dynamically manages power at the GPU, rack, and workload levels to recover stranded capacity inside a fixed megawatt budget. A companion component, DSX Flex, lets a site respond to grid signals such as demand-response and pricing events. NVIDIA says MaxLPS recovers stranded power so operators can provision up to 40% more GPUs within the same megawatt budget, which it describes as the direct path to the lowest cost per token.
The buildout so far
Firebird’s Armenia project has moved in documented stages. In November 2025, the company announced its first U.S. export authorization and a $500 million initial investment, with Dell PowerEdge servers and NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs as the foundation stack. In February 2026, Firebird and the U.S. government announced Phase Two, scaling the megaproject to $4 billion with export licensing for an additional 41,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs, disclosed at a Yerevan press briefing with Vice President JD Vance. The Hrazdan opening, which Unite.AI covered from the ceremony, turned the first phase of that licensed capacity into a running facility, and the expansion announcement extends the same model across borders.
The pattern is deliberate: each new market enters with government approvals and a U.S. export license already in hand, the two documents that decide whether a GPU cluster in a frontier market can exist at all.
What has to happen for the map to fill in
The stated milestones are dated. Firebird’s Armenia campus is scheduled to pass 70,000 GPUs and 300 MW by the end of 2027, and the company’s global pipeline target lands at the end of 2028. The Kazakhstan build already has its two critical signatures, Astana’s approval and the BIS export authorization, though Firebird has not announced a construction start or commissioning date for Data Center Valley. The NVIDIA investment, described as an intention, had not closed as of the announcement.
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