Storm-1516 Reportedly Spread Fabricated Narratives Targeting Firebird Data Center in Armenia

June 24, 2026

Firebird reported that Storm-1516, a Russian influence operation, targeted Firebird's NVIDIA-powered data center under construction in Hrazdan, Armenia, with purportedly fabricated media narratives designed to make the project appear dangerous and economically unstable. The campaign allegedly used imitation tech-news articles to cast the facility as a liability for Armenia's infrastructure and Western-aligned technology ambitions.

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Alleged deployer

storm-1516, pro-russian-information-manipulation-actors, operators-of-inauthentic-media-sites, information-manipulation-actors

Alleged developer

generative-ai-system-developers

Alleged harmed parties

x-(twitter)-users, united-states-armenia-technology-cooperation-stakeholders, united-states-armenia-relations, social-media-users, public-trust-in-ai-infrastructure, general-public-of-armenia, general-public, firebird, epistemic-integrity

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Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.