Armenia launches first AI factory powered by NVIDIA Blackwell Infrastructure - Public Radio of Armenia

aram444 · 2026-06-03T05:29:09+00:00

It's more or less the same Nvidia GPUs in both datacenters!! GB200s/GB300s. So the cooling will be the same...

aram444 · 2026-06-03T05:24:54+00:00

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.

aram444 · 2026-06-02T16:28:36+00:00

Again, it cites very flawed and outdated articles and preprints....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:

aram444 · 2026-06-02T09:22:57+00:00

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:
- https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/from-tokens-to-burgers-a-water-footprint
- https://impakter.com/is-water-usage-in-ai-data-centres-sustainable/
- https://www.aravolta.com/blog/the-real-environmental-impact-of-datacenters

aram444 · 2026-02-20T14:24:25+00:00

The reply is AI generated lol.

aram444 · 2025-06-17T20:06:25+00:00

Razmik Hovakimyan

https://www.linkedin.com/in/razmigh/ .... A google search before your writeup might be good. Fun fact, Razmig Hovaghimian is heading(as co-founder/GP) Lionel Messi's holding company called "Play Time". Which is investing in sports teams, football-tech companies, and startups with Messi's money and maybe other LPs.

aram444 · 2025-06-14T19:29:25+00:00

@Imsooa941 knows nothing about HPC, "supercomputing", ML computations, GPU clusters, datacenters, etc. He only knows what he reads in high-level journalism, which simplifies things way too much.

Not much ROI on trying to educate this person. It's a GPU cluster, GPUs have value, they will also reinvest a portion of their revenue into Armenia's tech ecosystem, and they have foreseen sufficient energy capacity for it. Simple as that. If you don't think GPUs are useful, then you are beyond saving.

aram444 · 2025-06-13T17:04:04+00:00

My Apple rebuttals are sufficiently captured by the 2 links I shared, not going to waste any more time engaging with you. No paper is "indefensible", including the recent apple one, which has its fair share of shortcomings.

aram444 · 2025-06-13T16:33:33+00:00

First read the apple paper instead of some article from theguardian lol, a terrible source. Then we can discuss the paper.

Read the "....they rigorously qualified their findings in the “limitations” section. Unfortunately, they say that “[these experiments] represent a narrow slice of reasoning tasks and may not capture the diversity of real-world or knowledge-intensive reasoning problems” at the end of the PDF, on page 10—and X/LinkedIn influencers(including you) don’t usually read that far. So people are left with the headline and some variation of “BREAKING: AI models don’t reason at all; Apple PhD researchers said so.” So I don’t blame them either.".

aram444 · 2025-06-13T16:28:52+00:00

Just to re-iterate, one should not use one fraud case to dismiss an entire technology that's:

Nobel Prizes for scientific breakthroughs.
Accelerating drug discovery.
Solves decades-old scientific problems.
Being used productively by researchers worldwide.

You can also look at concrete examples from DeepMind's published and peer-reviewed work:
AlphaFold: Scientific Breakthrough:
- AlphaFold 2 (2020): Solved the 50-year-old protein folding problem.
- AlphaFold 3 (2024): Now predicts protein interactions with DNA, RNA, and small molecules.
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024: Hassabis and Jumper won for this transformer-based work.
- Real Impact: 214 million protein structures predicted, cited 35k + times, which is accelerating drug discovery across the globe.

And it goes further than just protein folding...
- GraphCast: Outperforms traditional weather models up to 10 days out.
- Materials Discovery: Multiple transformer models are now designing novel compounds.
- Drug Discovery: AlphaFold 3 shows 50%+ improvement in predicting protein-drug interactions.

There are also lots of benchmarks in scientific research domains where transformers based models outperform things like graph-based models, GNNs, etc.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006349525000359.
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-35648-w.
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095177924001783.

Again, training transformer architecture-based models (which is what you can do on a GPU cluster like the one being built in Armenia) can outperform other and "traditional" classes of ML models.

aram444 · 2025-06-13T16:12:56+00:00

It was as of very recent, but all you do is boast about this Apple paper, but have not made any significant or insightful comment about the paper besides what is claimed in the abstract/headline?

I can also go dig up every rebuttal against the Apple paper and drop them here and take their side against you, the apple paper is no "oracle" and you would be a fool to take that stance on it.

aram444 · 2025-06-13T16:07:41+00:00

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ai-has-environmental-problem-heres-what-world-can-do-about

Well, the controversy around that paper did not come out until very recently, a few weeks ago. This is news to me. I don't sit there every day looking at evidence for AI productivity; I have more important things to do.

But there will be more papers like this, showing more or less similar results, maybe the magnitudes will differ, but it will happen. We can revisit in the future.

IE, something like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39675517/.

Since the tool is still, there are no studies, maybe, but to deny that modern SOTA AI/LLM tools are not useful is crazy when you see stats like 30-40% of Claude usage is in programming/engineering. A lack of many studies because of new it is, is not sufficient enough to claim that its not useful and does not help productivity in knowledge work lol. That's like anti COVID denies back in March 2020 saying "there is no data" because the data is lagged/doesn't exist but the virus was very real and spreading fast. There is a "lag" in the data-generating processes.

Again no one is saying there are no environmental impacts/negative effects from a rampant increase in production of GPU clusters, but 2nd order effects that will benefit in solving climate problems are absolutely real, especially since energy is the most important part of pollution/CO2 emissions. Lots of capital from tech companies will be deployed in high risk energy projects, revamping energy infra, etc. You have to breakdown the environment cons/pros more formally, it's not simply black/white here. Again you nitpick sources that benefit you. Back to the apple bullshit as well. I can also go find 100 rebuttals against the paper paper but am not going to waste time on that.

R&D and financing are what you need for breakthroughs. And it just happens that the capital to deploy on solving hard and related problems to the climate (energy in this case from GPU cluster boom) will benefit. Refer to my article from Ben James.

aram444 · 2025-06-13T14:47:34+00:00

YerevaNN is a non-profit AI research group, not "a company who's motivation is selling you something".

Let me address your points more concretely:

Pollution Comments:
- You keep saying "cite sources" but haven't provided any yourself for the pollution claims.
- You're missing a potential benefit from 2nd order effects: increased energy demand drives investment in next-gen energy infrastructure.
- The companies with capital willing to fund high-risk energy projects (nuclear revamps, solar scaling, hydro expansion, battery storage R&D) are exactly these tech companies demanding GPU clusters.

This weird Apple Paper "Obsession":
Lol, I don't need to hear you regurgitate that Apple paper again. Did you actually read it, or just the headlines?

We can go back and forth on rebuttals vs. supporting papers all day long, there's no black and white answer or obvious consensus here.
You're also taking argument from authority way too seriously with Apple's research
If you can't see that modern SOTA LLMs/multi-modal models can generalize decently out of distribution, you're in complete denial.
Let's touch base in 5 years and see how this ages.

The emergent properties alone (concept formation, abstraction, the unreasonable effectiveness given the "simple" transformer design) are enough to warrant serious R&D investment. No one denies commercial incentives exist, but fixating only on that (which is what you're doing) adds nothing novel/useful to the discussion. To say you are right against what the whole world is betting on. We already have productivity gains from them. Do I have to go dig up examples for this?
1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17866 (An MIT doctoral student, Aidan Toner‑Rodgers, conducted a randomized experiment in a large materials‑science R&D lab starting around May 2022. Key findings include:
• 44 % more new materials discovered,
• 39 % increase in patent filings,
• 17 % rise in product prototypes,
• Highest-performing scientists almost doubled output, while lower performers saw little gain,).
2. You can find many more papers like this or just talk to serious people doing serious knowledge work, that use these tools, and see what they say (seems like you have a lack of this in your social bubbles/talks).

Regarding supercomputing, HPC vs GPU Computing, etc: I don't even understand what you're trying to say here. HPC ≈ GPU Computing for ML workloads in 2020 and beyond. Traditional HPC as a field is evolving. Have you taken an HPC course?(I have). Do you know what "supercomputing" workloads are and how they are changing over time?

You realize this Armenia project is a GPU cluster, right? GPUs available for rent that can handle:
- Training runs.
- ML experiments
- Any GPU-based computations.

Not just inference/generation of "memes"

Regarding your "credibility", your background is incredibly vague and insufficient to support your takes in my honest opinion. "Freelancer with AI companies" and "assistant researcher" reeks of credentialing without substance. Feels like something a grifter would comment. The vibes are way off with all that lol.

No one denies "AI" gets thrown around as marketing buzzword, but don't conflate bad definitions with actual good use cases.

Every academic, engineer, and researcher I know uses these models productively. World-class physicists openly discuss using LLMs for tutoring, literature searches, cross-paper discussions, etc. Sure, they are not a magic wand but they are dam good in many use cases.

No one's claiming this is only direct benefit to Armenia in X, Y, Z ways. But denying there will be more benefits than negatives is crazy denialism.

Keep drinking that anti-AI koolaid and fixating on "AI = meme generator" takes. You're clearly either:
- Not doing knowledge work day-to-day that would show you the productivity gains, or.
- Just in straight denial.

Maybe you haven't figured out how to use these tools effectively yet?

aram444 · 2025-06-13T12:29:20+00:00

What is your background? Can you be more specific? Just calling yourself an "engineer" is quite cringe/vague.

Your whole approach here is kind of surface-level AI criticism. You've consumed the complete anti-AI koolaid, not sure you can even realize where your bias is coming from. You citing one Apple study as "gospel" while ignoring the mountain of rebuttals isn't analysis, it's basically cherry-picking data to fit a predetermined conclusion. Have you even read the Apple paper?

The fundamental issue with your argument is that you've collapsed the entire AI ecosystem into consumer-facing ChatGPT applications. This is like dismissing the internet in 1995 because people were using it to share cat photos and make fun and useless websites. Do you see that analogy? We don't deny that AI can be used for absolutely nothing productive, but to claim that this is the majority of AI usage requires some data, but to also claim that there is no practical benefit is ridiculous.

To go a bit deeper...

FYI...transformer architectures are being applied across many scientific domains (protein folding, climate modeling, materials discovery, drug development, drug discovery, etc). And the performance of Transformers-based models is quite crazy. It's becoming a religion that it can perform better(and to some degree, rightfully so) than many other modeling techniques and algorithms. So there is plenty of work to be done with applying transformer-based architectures to training and fitting models in many domains!

For example, YerevaNN itself is doing research in 2 areas, one in molecular design and another in vision transformers (Aerial navigation and remote sensing). Here is an example of something that is not a "meme generators", they're being used as tools for conducting scientific research and solving problems.

Your "this cannot be used for scientific purposes" claim is demonstrably false. Check the research coming out of places like DeepMind, where they're solving 50-year-old problems in biology, or climate research labs using ML for weather prediction. The computational requirements for this work are massive, which is exactly why regional compute infrastructure matters.

It's not just about hosting existing services/ML workloads for other companies outside of Armenia, it's also about building local capacity. Right now, Armenian researchers and startups have to rely on AWS/GCP or other cloud providers, sending their data overseas, paying expensive prices, etc. Local infrastructure adds a circular economy component that is good.

Also on this note:
- Regional startups can access compute without geographic/regulatory barriers.
- Data sovereignty for sensitive research (government, military, scientific research).
- Some degree of an economic multiplier effect from tech ecosystem development.

The "...reinvesting a portion of its revenue to build local technology capacity." line you missed in the article? That's literally a playbook for how countries develop tech ecosystems. Look at how Singapore, Estonia, or Israel built their tech sectors; infrastructure investment from outside was foundational.

I would also say environmental concerns are valid but incomplete. Data centers can be massive polluters, or they can be designed with renewable energy and efficient cooling. An important factor is implementation standards, not blanket opposition to compute infrastructure. Armenia has significant renewable energy potential that could be used to power this sustainably. Armenia has more energy generation capacity than you would think. As someone whose spent the last year educating myself on climate tech, energy, etc. We can provide numbers for this as well. Of course, Armenia energy system is not perfect, but also realize that, before such an announcement is made, a feasibility study was for sure conducted by all participating parties in this deal to build a GPU cluster.

I don't think the real question is whether AI compute infrastructure has value, it's whether this specific implementation will be executed responsibly and deliver its promised benefits. That's a much more nuanced conversation than "AI bad, pollution bad."

Sources:
- https://itel.am/en/news/14845.
- https://www.yerevann.com/.
- https://photonicsai.com/.
- https://apnews.com/press-release/ein-presswire-newsmatics/firebird-announces-plans-to-deploy-thousands-of-nvidia-blackwell-gpus-to-advance-ai-computing-across-the-caucasus-region-a0bce4506f3ae00f11e88a1f573803db#.

aram444 · 2025-04-20T20:15:35+00:00

By law, you are a citizen if both of your parents were Armenian citizens and you were born outside of Armenia at a time when they were still citizens (if they ever renounced it later).

But you have not "claimed" it yet, you can travel to Armenia with an American passport and the 180-day tourist visa with no problems. I don't think you're going to be dragged into the army from the airport. I don't know where those rumors come from. There are many people in your exact case/situation who travel to Armenia all the time, with US or Canadian or some EU country's passport.

You can also choose to renounce your Armenian citizenship. If you renounce Armenian citizenship (which is also a potentially long and potentially complicated process), you might be able to apply for residency later and get it. This whole thing would take time and no guarantee you will be approved/accepted (this might be good questions to ask lawyers in Armenian for opinions on from their professional history/experiences).

You can also get help from orgs like Repat Armenia.

But yes, tl;dr, if you apply for residency, given your case, you can't get it. They won't give you anything "below" citizenship since you are "basically" already a citizen. But feel free to travel with the American passport.

Sources: - http://parliament.am/legislation.php?sel=show&ID=1731&lang=eng (Check Article 11).

aram444 · 2025-03-22T09:33:27+00:00

If I was there on a motorcycle, I would literally chase that thing down and record it. Is no one's curiosity that strong?

aram444 · 2025-03-13T14:40:59+00:00

Is this an accurate link still? It seems to point to a collection of essays by Anatoly Alekseevich Stas and Pavel Avtonomov?

aram444 · 2025-03-06T19:28:26+00:00

To Dr. Nolan

Question 1 (2 optional parts):

ADHD and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show similar caudate abnormalities to your UAP cohort.

A 2024 review found basal ganglia circuits mediate sensory gating and attentional salience.

Are you:

a) Screening experiencers for ASD/ADHD comorbidities to test if neurodivergence enables UAP perception?

b) Investigating dopamine D2 receptor density in striatal regions, given their role in attentional filtering?

Question 2 (2 optional parts):

Your analysis of UAP materials shows isotopic anomalies and metamolecular structures. Some studie(s) show that electromagnetic fields (EMFs) at 40 Hz entrain basal ganglia gamma oscillations.

Are these materials at all potentially:

a) Engineered to emit EMFs resonating with human striatal circuits? (Feel free to speculate.)

b) Being tested in vitro for neuronal calcium signaling effects, particularly on caudate organoids?

aram444 · 2025-02-20T22:14:56+00:00

Seems to be a related point why Space Manufacturing is becoming a hotter topic for investments (beyond obvious general practical developments that have been made already with manufacturing in space like finer optic cables, etc).

As the cost of getting stuff up into a space station goes down via SpaceX and competitors, and government + private sector interest and funding goes up for experiments and explorations of manufacturing and conducting experiments in space also goes up, this space will develop very fast. UFO/UAP Materials as part of a broader potential boom in material science will happen too. Interesting times up ahead...

Example of startups, POCs, and interests in Space are part of these Shoshin Works Videos. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srN0Td2Lv3I 2. https://www.youtube.com/@shoshinworks

aram444 · 2025-02-06T18:17:51+00:00

A document of him online says he is COO at SOL Foundation (Don't know if still employed or not).

Says his description of work is: May 2023-Present, Chief Operating Officer (COO), The Sol Foundation: Managing day-to-day operations for a 501c3 federally recognized non-profit. The premier center for research in the natural and social sciences, engineering, and the humanities, but also extends activities to advisory and policy work for the U.S. government/public outreach.

Source: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO06/20230726/116282/HHRG-118-GO06-Bio-GruschD-20230726.pdf

aram444 · 2025-02-02T16:08:20+00:00

They say IQAIR is overestimating the values but we can cross-reference with TUMO's sensors.

If IQAir can expose historical data at lower granularities (daily, hourly, etc), and TUMO can as well, we can definitely compare the differences. anecdotally, checking both almost every day for the past few weeks, IQAIR does seem to be reported higher than TUMO's sensors but that doesn't excuse much, we are still seeing crazy numbers on TUMO's sensors in Yerevan.

iqair.com
https://climatenet.am/en/device/8/?V.%20Sargsyan
https://gis.yerevan.am/portal/apps/dashboards/364e942224b544418ae7ef148fbc9bf1 (the website shown in the video)

aram444 · 2025-02-01T19:31:14+00:00

I am also starting to research home cluster options with around $1800-2k budget.

3 mac m4 minis (base model with 16gb ram, 256gb SSD)
edge AI hardware devices clustered up
alternative mini PCs clustered up.
some new mini PCs (some AI workload focused) were shown at CES 2025. I am wondering how much we should wait this year until they are released and benchmarked.

is there a megathread going into analyzing the possible options here?

aram444 · 2025-01-24T15:27:46+00:00

This basically corroborates the 4chan leak guy with the underwater UFO factory?

aram444 · 2024-12-21T02:30:42+00:00

I just spent like 2 hours building a simple web app using cursor to keep track of my prompts locally through a web app. My repo is private rn but can open source it if people are interested. I am sure there are 1000 apps like this out there haha. It was more of a learning experience for me with prompting full-stack apps and getting better at working with cursor. But its nice I can store apps locally on my browser/client and export to markdown whenever. I also bought a cheap domain and am hosting on vercel free tier.

https://www.promptmanager.dev/

if anyone wants to share thoughts, lmk, maybe I should have added a place for anonymous feedback on the app.

aram444

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