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“As Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey join together and engage in major infrastructure projects, such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, to revive their historic role as a land bridge between east and west, Armenia has been conspicuously left by the wayside. However, Armenia has taken a different path. Rather than diving head first into the promises of the New Silk Road or industrialization, they’re wagering their chips on a completely different table: technology,”  Forbes writes in an article published on Friday.

The source reminds that the country has scant natural resources and doesn’t have any ports.
“All the country has is human capital, which it’s doubling-down on as high-tech research and development has become a national priority—a do or die objective to connect and do business with the outside world and break the blockade that’s building up around it,” said the article.

“The Armenian nation has never really been able to live for itself. It's always had someone dominating it or ruling it or manipulating it,” in an interview with the outlet explained the half-Armenian Reddit cofounder, Alexis Ohanian. “This could mark the start of the first time when this country and especially the young people—the ones who are the most hungry, the most driven, the most optimistic—to actually have a chance to determine for themselves the fate of the country and where it heads, and that is a part of the Armenian experiment that has not really ever happened.”

A new outlook was established, and the power of technology was one of its driving forces: IT, software development and high-tech startups would form the backbone of the newly reemergent nation.

“We have small resources and high technology is one of the main directions of the Armenian economy to overcome the blockade and to import and export our educational brands outside,” said Arayik Harutyunyan, Armenia’s Minister of Education and Science.

It is noted that Tech is now the largest foreign investment in Armenia and many of the world’s most powerful technology firms—including Intel, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Synopsys and Cisco—all have a physical presence there, as the country’s tech sector grew 33% in 2018 to become a $250 million a year industry. While these numbers don’t seem like much—it’s scarcely more than what Jeff Bezos makes in one day—we need to keep Armenia’s diminutive size and small population in perspective.

The article in its entirety is available here .