How three trips to a war-weary country, a golf course in the shadow of Mt. Ararat, and a hunch about NVIDIA became one of the most significant geopolitical tech stories of 2026 and how I was there before anyone else.
In October 2023, just two weeks after Armenia lost Nagorno-Karabakh territory it had held for decades I flew to Yerevan to attend Digitec, the country's largest tech conference. The timing wasn't coincidental. A country processing a military defeat while simultaneously betting its entire future on technology was a story worth telling.
I was one of three foreign journalists in attendance alongside Craig Smith of the New York Times and Forbes and editor Varun Kesari. What I found wasn't just grief, but also resilience. A nation that had just lost a war was building one of the most compelling tech ecosystems I'd ever seen.
I came back in 2024. I played golf in the shadow of Mt. Ararat. I covered ServiceTitan's historic Nasdaq debut. I kept watching. Then in October 2025, back in Yerevan for Digitec again, I heard about Firebird and the NVIDIA GPU export approval. The deeper story the diplomacy, the strategy, what it actually meant that one I told first and told better.
Then Vance landed in Yerevan. And everything I'd been reporting for two years became front-page news.
The original. Written two weeks after Armenia lost Nagorno-Karabakh a country betting everything on tech.
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