New Delhi, Aug. 20 -- Asked on Thursday whether he ruled out building a conventional nuclear power plant, Nikol Pashinyan gave a two-word answer. He does not. What made the question worth asking is that Armenia had spent two years insisting its nuclear future was small.

the plan was once to export most of what the country produced, and now it is clear that a great deal will be needed at home.

That sentence is the news, and the reason for it is already under construction. Armenia is building an artificial intelligence data centre with the American company Firebird, a 300 megawatt facility that entered a second phase worth $4bn and 50,000 GPUs, backed by a $300m syndicated loan signed in March, the first Armenian financing of that kind fo...