Hosted by Hydra Host
El Salvador has made the world’s first sovereign purchase of Nvidia B300 GPUs.
According to a post from the country’s National Bitcoin Office (ONBTC) on social media platform X, the Blackwell Ultra chips will be housed at El Salvador’s National AI Lab.
The purchase has been facilitated by Hydra Host, a company that provides compute infrastructure to data centers. Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra chip combines two reticle-sized GPUs, has 15 petaflops of FP4 performance, and 288GB of HBM3e.
Following a meeting with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Hydra Host’s CEO, Aaron Ginn, wrote on LinkedIn: “My team is proud to support this moment as we continue to build GPU infrastructure in over 50 data centers around the world. El Salvador now joins that network with its first full-time team member.”
Ginn will also lecture students involved with El Salvador’s CUBO_ai program, an AI education program established by ONBTC.
The procurement is part of a wider deal between Nvidia and the government of El Salvador, which recently signed a letter of intent to provide the country with tools and knowledge to drive innovation and economic development, according to a report from the Salvadoran newspaper, Diario El Salvador.
In an additional post on X, ONBTC wrote: “With its own Sovereign AI, El Salvador will be self-sufficient and autonomous in AI production, ensuring strategic resilience, economic competitiveness, and protection against external influence or cyber threats.
“On its path to becoming a global tech hub, El Salvador has fast become the regional reference for AI policy, education, and excellence.”
In June 2025, El Salvador launched the National Agency for Artificial Intelligence (ANIA), a state-run AI agency that will oversee the promotion and regulation of AI in the country.
Headed by Mario Flamenco, a Bitcoin enthusiast who has been working with ONBTC since 2022, the agency will report directly to President Bukele, a figure who has been accused of widespread human rights violations since his election in 2019.
In addition to overseeing what Human Rights Watch called “serious human rights abuses, including against children, and a weakening of the rule of law,” Salvadorian security forces have also carried out “mass arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, and torture and ill-treatment of detainees,” as part of Bukele’s “war against gangs.”
The government of El Salvador has also been working with the Trump administration to jail more than 250 Venezuelan migrants who have been forcibly removed from the US, as well as 29-year-old Kilmar Ábrego García, who was taken to the Cecot mega-prison in March as a result of an "administrative error” from the Trump administration.
