YEREVAN — Yerevan State University hosted one of the country’s most significant technology events of the year, AI Conf Armenia 2026, bringing together leading experts, scientists, and approximately 2,600 registered participants. The conference served as a strategic platform aimed at positioning Armenia among global leaders in artificial intelligence while showcasing the country’s expanding computational capabilities.
The keynote speaker, Rev Lebaredian Vice-president of NVIDIA, described the evolution of artificial intelligence as entering a new phase in which the “rules of the game” are not yet fully defined—creating relatively equal starting conditions for both small and large countries.
“Today, no one in the world fully knows how to use AI, which creates equal opportunities for countries like Armenia and the United States,” Lebaredian said. “We are becoming a country rich in AI capabilities, but it depends on us whether we take advantage of this opportunity. We have the chance to move faster than others.”
Lebaredian emphasized that once the announced 50,000 GPUs are deployed by the end of the year, Armenia could rank among the top five countries globally in terms of GPU capacity, surpassing even major European nations. He noted that this is not merely a technical milestone, but a strategic opportunity that could significantly reshape Armenia’s position in the global technology landscape.
He also announced that the first phase—6,000 GPUs—will become accessible to researchers within the next month.
During his presentation, Lebaredian outlined the artificial intelligence ecosystem as a “five-layer cake,” with each layer playing a critical role:
- Energy, forming the foundation of AI,
- Chips, which convert energy into computational intelligence,
- Infrastructure, including data centers that generate “tokens,”
- Models, such as GPT and Claude,
- Applications, where AI is used to solve real-world problems across sectors like science, agriculture, and business.
According to Lebaredian, Armenia is already participating across all five layers of this ecosystem—marking only the beginning of its development.
The broader significance of this transformation is underscored by a series of developments: a country of just three million people gaining access to over 110,000 GPUs, a $25 million investment in computational resources made available to students, researchers, and startups, and the gathering of global technology leaders at Yerevan State University to focus not on what might happen, but on how to harness these opportunities.
Together, these developments signal a technological transformation whose scale and speed are increasingly defining Armenia’s potential role in the AI era. In this context, Yerevan State University is emerging as a key platform—where technology is transformed into knowledge, infrastructure into results, and opportunity into reality.
