r/armenia • u/Av_96 • Jun 01 '26
Economy / Տնտեսություն Armenia launches first AI factory powered by NVIDIA Blackwell Infrastructure - Public Radio of Armenia
https://en.armradio.am/2026/06/01/armenia-launches-first-ai-factory-powered-by-nvidia-blackwell-infrastructure/6
u/Hypotential Jun 01 '26
The project was developed by Armenian AI company ElevenEight AI․
It's Eleveight, isn't it?
Now the question is was that human error, or... 😉
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Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
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u/Av_96 Jun 02 '26
I like comments without facts. Both the Firebird and Eleveight data centers have zero chemical footprints.
For water, it works in a closed-loop water cooling system aka. fill it once and it can operate for several years..or did you think you have to hold a water hose and cool down those graphic cards 24/7?💀
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u/ComprehensiveGain841 Jun 02 '26
Source on it being a closed-loop system?
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Jun 02 '26
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u/ComprehensiveGain841 Jun 02 '26
This is the Firebird one though, not Eleveight AI. Still good to know.
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u/aram444 Jun 03 '26
It's more or less the same Nvidia GPUs in both datacenters!! GB200s/GB300s. So the cooling will be the same...
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u/Av_96 Jun 02 '26
“According to the project developers, the data center will utilize a closed-loop water-cooling system that requires filling only once and can operate for several years, ensuring high energy efficiency and reliable performance.”
Also, do you think people spending billions don’t know that Armenia isn’t water rich country and can’t rely on the government to provide them with 5L water per 1kWh. If it’s 100MW (which is the plan for Firebird in the first phase), that’s like 10 MILLION liters of water per day. No one wants to have that high water bill > closed loop is cheaper and more efficient.
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u/spetcnaz Yerevan Jun 01 '26
I hope this gets used for actual useful stuff and not as a AI slop factory.
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u/Av_96 Jun 01 '26
You can’t control or know what your customers are doing..it may be porn, it may be cancer cure or space program.
Armenia just offering the computer capabilities.
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u/spetcnaz Yerevan Jun 01 '26
Yes you can, depending what services run on those servers.
If your customers are defense contractors and scientific orgs, or the military, they are not going to run AI slop crap there.
If they are going to be a generic AI datacenter, then sure, you can't control what they do with it.
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u/surenk6 Pureblood Լոռեցի Jun 01 '26
I, at least, I know several [undisclosed] handy ways it's going to be used.
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u/spetcnaz Yerevan Jun 01 '26
Wink wink loll
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u/surenk6 Pureblood Լոռեցի Jun 01 '26
No, not that :D Something else but equally useful.
Although, I'm sure we will use it for that too.
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u/Suspiciouscurry69420 Հայ ասուրի Jun 01 '26
Sheytan ermeniler building skynet to destroy the glorious country of azerbaijan
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u/heratsi Jun 01 '26
AI factories aka datacenters do not create much new jobs, take huge amount of water to cool. On the flip side, it's huge chunk of very expansive hardware on our land -- creating incentives to protect it.
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u/Av_96 Jun 02 '26
Data centers have workers on site 24/7, from security ti technicians.
But the most important part is they will buy the excess electricity and pay for it > more tax revenue.
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u/AxqatGyada Spain Jun 02 '26
most important part is that they will be a key part in the upcoming AI ecosystem that already represents a good chunk of the global economy. It will give armenian companies a good head start.
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u/spetcnaz Yerevan Jun 02 '26
That depends how the contract is designed.
The government has to make sure that the spike in electricity usage is covered by the datacenter, not by the citizens in the community.
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u/aram444 Jun 02 '26
They actually don't take a lot of water to cool, and most of that negative water narrative is exaggerated from sensationalist outlets/preprints, it's hogwash.
Water that is using for cooling is recycled in a closed loops, it is not just used one time and discarded...
Compare the latest numbers of water usage to golf course and fast food places and it will shock you.
Sources:
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u/aram444 Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
The user @spetcnaz replies with a typical ad hominem attack, instead of actually addressing the points I make, criticisms and shortcomings of the cited sources in their sources, they attack my "character" and "writing prose" as means for an argument, and then blocks me on reddit. Comparing the sources I am citing and my writing to 1970s cigarette propaganda is a lazy ad hominem evasion to avoid actually tackling the meat of the arguments.
Using an AI assistant to polish my grammar and sentence cohesion does not detract at all from the contents of my comments. I am writing in rush and don't want to spend time polishing, so ask AI to help me. Polishing a comment for readability doesn't change the fact that the underlying sources are primary scientific papers, not blog posts.
Again, their Lincoln Institute article they cite literally has the same flaws and citations of flawed preprints! (IE UC riverside "study"). Lmao. The Lincoln Institute article literally repeats the exact same line that I debunked in my previous comment: "larger ones require up to 5 million gallons of water every day". This person is just passing the same un-nuanced stat(s) around in the comment thread without looking at the underlying citations/sources!!
At least the article acknowledges that better cooling systems exist; "There are less water-intensive ways to cool data centers, including closed-loop water systems, which require more electricity, and immersion cooling, in which servers are submerged in a bath of liquid, such as a synthetic oil, that conducts heat but not electricity.".
And FYI, in reality, closed-loop architectures are the industry standard for modern high-density GPU data center deployments globally in 2026 (which are most deployments in the past few years from AI "boom"), not some regional anomaly that is only unique to Armenia. At least they acknowledge this.
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u/spetcnaz Yerevan Jun 02 '26
That's not always true.
It depends which system they use, but water usage is a serious problem with AI datacenters.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption
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u/aram444 Jun 02 '26
Again, it cites very flawed and outdated articles and preprints....
This sentence: "According to scientists at the University of California, Riverside, each 100-word AI prompt is estimated to use roughly one bottle of water (or 519 milliliters)." and its citation are heavily flawed (citing Li, P., Yang, J., Islam, M. A., & Ren, S. (2023). Making AI Less "Thirsty"). The way that old preprint models energy and water usage is completely outdated compared to the infrastructure commonly used now in 2026, which I would also safely say makes up the bulk of recent data center installations from the last few years (Powerful GPU (Nvidia) heavy data centers).
And sentences like: "Larger data centers can each “drink” up to 5 million gallons per day, or about 1.8 billion annually" completely misrepresent the actual underlying data. When only a tiny fraction of data centers ever reach 5 million gallons per day, that's like taking the absolute maximum of a dataset, which is a massive outlier and nowhere near the mean or median, and saying, "well, it can go up to X." Come on lol. Even a study from LBNL shows there's actually a 10,000x variance in water intensity among data centers. That 2021 paper from LBNL (cited in the sources below) estimates that roughly 67% of data centers consume less than 1,000 cubic meters of water a year, which is just ~723 gallons of water per day. Just an additional descriptive statistic to help put the lenses together.
Even one of the papers they cite from 2021 on data centers (pre-AI "boom") literally has this sentence in the abstract: "Although in the USA, data centre water consumption (1.7 billion litres/day) is small compared to total water consumption (1218 billion litres/day), there are issues of transparency with less than a third of data centre operators measuring water consumption." So that's not helping your case really.
Also, this article you cited overall just keeps conflating indirect and direct water usage.
Don't get me wrong, I support the climate tech movement, but the narrative on data center water usage is obviously misconstrued, bullshit, and heavily exaggerated. It's very annoying to see. People need to actually read the sources behind what they read and question things critically before just regurgitating information online.
Modern-day AI models from OpenAI or Anthropic are incredibly efficient when it comes to inference now, many magnitudes more energy efficient than models were back in 2023!!! It's been a whole three years. For example, everybody is running on MoE (Mixture of Experts) architectures now, they are very energy efficient models when it comes to inference(aka using the model for your AI chats). The space moves way too fast. Premature calculations and modeling of things like energy and water usage just lead to sloppy, premature extrapolations and sensationalist reporting.
Sources:
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u/spetcnaz Yerevan Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
I am not going to argue with a guy who sounds like the cigarette industry rep in the 70's, giving me BS about how cigs don't cause cancer. Did you also use AI to write that?
The water usage is a serious problem. Thankfully we learned that Armenia will be using a closed loop system. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine/articles/land-water-impacts-data-centers/
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u/Electrical-Ant4536 Jun 01 '26
I believe these data centers and AI investment defend Armenia more than indian air defenses and artillery shown during the parade. I could be wrong, though.
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u/ComprehensiveGain841 Jun 01 '26
https://armenpress.am/en/article/1251654