The Wall Street Journal reports that the United States pledged to supply Nvidia accelerators to Armenia as a diplomatic incentive within a broader Azerbaijan peace agreement.
The United States has promised Armenia access to some 70,000 highly desired Nvidia AI chips as part of its efforts to broker a peace deal with Azerbaijan in 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources. The pledged hardware will be installed in the recently inaugurated Firebird data centre, the largest such facility in the region.
US negotiators reportedly promised to authorise the sale of the chips as an incentive to bring Armenia to the negotiating table, culminating in the Washington summit in August 2025 between US President Donald Trump, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The summit resulted in the initialling, but not signing, of a peace treaty intended to end decades of conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. A year later, the treaty remains unsigned, but significant steps have been made towards peace, including the opening of trade between the two countries and the launching of the proposed Trump Route infrastructure project, which would link Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan through Armenian territory.
Ahead of the summit, US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff prepared a memorandum outlining a plan to deepen Armenia’s economic relationship with the US and bolster the country’s tech industry, including granting export licenses for the Firebird chips. Despite his lack of prior experience, Witkoff has emerged as one of the Trump administration’s top negotiators in international affairs. Then-US Ambassador to Armenia Kristina Kvien also helped promote the arrangement, personally meeting with Commerce Department officials to ask whether the sale of chips could be authorised.
Nvidia independently took steps to build ties with Armenia, utilising executive Rev Lebaredian, who is of Armenian descent. ‘For this administration, chip diplomacy is front and centre. Our presence in Armenia and our investment in it is a big factor in creating the conditions by which peace can unfold’, Lebaredian told the Wall Street Journal. Senator Steve Daines, who has made several official trips to the South Caucasus in Trump’s second term, added: ‘Firebird is the most tangible thing that Prime Minister Pashinyan can point to and say, “Peace delivered this”. Getting the chips was a crucial political win’.
While Firebird had already applied for an export license for some graphics processing units (GPUs), it was only after the Washington Summit that the actual export of tens of thousands more Nvidia chips were officially approved, the Wall Street Journal reported.