Nvidia just got cleared by the U.S. government to export its chips to Armenia, a country whose entire economy is about 160 times smaller than Nvidia’s $4.5 trillion market cap.
That approval puts the world’s most powerful/valuable company directly in partnership with a tiny Caucasus nation that’s now central to a much larger political chessboard.
According to Trump’s White House, Nvidia’s chips are going to Firebird, an Armenian AI startup planning a supercomputer project.
This is part of a larger U.S. plan to use AI technology as leverage, and was approved by the Trump administration, which has been using chip exports as a way to expand influence without deploying troops. Armenia becomes one of the latest targets in what’s now clearly a tech-based diplomatic strategy.
Just yesterday, Washington also gave the green light for AI chip sales to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. And inside the White House, there’s pressure on Congress to kill off a proposal that would restrict Nvidia from sending even more chips abroad.
Trump signs corridor deal and pulls Armenia into U.S. orbit
Trump didn’t only do chips. Back in August, he signed a peace agreement with both Armenia and Azerbaijan, ending years of fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The deal handed the U.S. exclusive rights to develop a transit corridor across Armenia, linking Azerbaijan to its Naxçıvan exclave near the Turkish border. That’s now being called the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.
If it’s completed, the corridor would give the U.S. a direct line into Central Asia, dodging Russia entirely. That region is loaded with minerals and energy, and those resources are exactly what the U.S. wants easier access to.
Trump’s team just hosted a summit in Washington, pulling in leaders from across Central Asia to pitch deeper cooperation, without Moscow in the picture.
Russia used to run this whole space before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and even now it still holds economic and political sway. But its war in Ukraine has flipped the board. A lot of these countries want new partners. And now the EU, China, and the U.S. are all racing to fill the gap.
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