By Elizabeth MacBride
Publication Date: 2025-11-30 17:21:00
Mount Ararat rising over Yerevan
Digitec
In the wake of the peace brokered by Donald Trump and after more than a decade of investment by the Armenian diaspora, Armenia is emerging as a small but formidable geopolitical hub, with a strategic location near Iran and Turkey, and an innovation economy that will now be powered by a $500m data center powered by Nvidia chips.
The U.S. government recently approved the deployment of the chips into the data center, which will be operated by a joint Armenian-American company, Firebird.AI.
The ambitious Firebird.AI initiative is the latest in a wave of diaspora-led investments, which have included the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, which brought hundreds of global development experts to the country about a decade ago, and a United World College school in the north of the country.
Armenia is an example of the way that, in the new world order, business and statecraft are merging, a trend Seth Levine and I write about in our latest book, Capital Evolution. Companies leverage capital, technology, diplomacy, and even security to shape societal outcomes in ways that traditional governments often cannot. Armenia exemplifies this trend, with diaspora entrepreneurs acting across borders as de facto economic developers, strategic advisors, and innovation catalysts.
The Armenian diaspora spread across the world as refugees fled a genocide in 1915. For more than 100 years, many children of diaspora families were reared to believe they must contribute…
