The US has approved the sale of Nvidia chips to Armenia for a 100MW data center.

This will be facilitated through AI cloud startup Firebird.ai, which announced a $500m public-private partnership with the Armenian government back in June.

Firebird CEO Razmig Hovaghimian told Bloomberg that the first phase of its data center would be operational by the second quarter of 2026.

Hovaghimian is the CEO of online streaming video site Viki and has been involved with several media and sports companies, including NBC, Hoodline, and Matchday.

Armenia has a small existing data center market. Rostelecom-owned Armenian telco Ovio, Datacom Company, and Arminco operate data centers in the capital, Yerevan. A small facility is being developed by local firm VSData.

This is one of several chip sale approvals given by the US government in the past month.

Just yesterday, Washington greenlit the sale of up to 70,000 Nvidia GB300 systems to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Earlier this month, it allowed Microsoft to ship Nvidia GPUs to the UAE as part of the company’s attempts to expand its cloud offering in the region.

Under the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, the stated aim of the government is to export the country’s full “technology stack” – including hardware, models, software, applications, and standards – to its allies and strategic partners across the world.

The administration has since taken a looser and more transactional approach to export controls.

In August, the administration made a stark reversal of policy when it allowed Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 GPUs to be sold to China, provided that the government receives 15 percent of the proceeds.

Moreover, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE made a combined $2.4 trillion worth of investment commitments in the US prior to receiving approval for their chip purchases.