In battle: Placing Russia’s datacentre market below the microscope
When Russian troops invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Russia’s datacentre sector was one of many fastest-growing segments of the nation’s IT business, with annual development charges within the area of 10-12%.
Nevertheless, with the battle ensuing within the imposition of Western sanctions towards Russia and an outflow of US-based tech corporations from the nation, together with Apple and Microsoft, optimism in regards to the sector’s potential for additional development quickly disappeared.
In early March 2025, it was reported that Google had disconnected from visitors trade factors and datacentres in Russia, resulting in issues about how this might negatively have an effect on the velocity of entry to some Google companies for Russian customers.
Initially, there was hope that home know-how and datacentre suppliers may be capable to plug the gaps left by the exodus of the US tech giants, but it surely appears they may not sustain with the internet hosting calls for of Russia’s more and more digital financial system.
Oleg Kim, director of the {hardware} techniques division at Russian IT firm Axoft, says the departure of international cloud suppliers and tools producers has led to a critical scarcity of compute capability in Russia.
It is because the scenario resulted in a pointy, preliminary improve in demand for home datacentres, however Russian suppliers merely didn’t have time to increase their capacities on the required scale, continues Kim.
Assembly consumer wants
In line with the estimates of Key Level, considered one of Russia’s largest datacentre networks, assembly Russia’s demand for datacentres would require services with a complete capability of 30,000 racks to be constructed annually over the following 5 years.
On prime of this, it has additionally grow to be extra expensive to construct datacentres in Russia.
Estimates recommend that previous to 2022 the price of a datacentre rack totaled 100,000 rubles (US$1200), however now exceeds 150,000 rubles.
And analysts at Forbes Russia anticipate these figures will proceed to develop, attributable to rising logistics prices and the influence the conflict is having on the provision of expert labour inside the development sector.
The influence of those challenges is being keenly felt by end-users, with a number of of the nation’s giant banks experiencing critical issues when discovering appropriate places for his or her datacentres.
Sberbank is among the many companies affected, with its chairperson German Gref talking out beforehand about how the financial institution is in want of a datacentre with at the very least 200 MW of capability, however would ideally want 300-400 MW to deal with its compute necessities.
Stanislav Bliznyuk, chairperson of T-Financial institution, says attempting to construct even two 50MW datacentres to satisfy its wants is proving problematic. “Discovering places the place such capability and enough tariffs can be found is a tough process,” he mentioned.
Regardless of this T-Financial institution is within the processing establishing its personal community of information processing facilities – the primary of which ought to open in early 2027, he confirmed in November 2024.
Kirill Solyev, head of the engineering infrastructure division of the Softline Group of Corporations, who concentrate on IT, says many giant Russian corporations are resorting to constructing their very own datacentres – as a result of compute capability is in such quick provide.
The scenario is, nevertheless, sophisticated by the dearth of appropriate places for datacentres within the largest cities of Russia – Moscow and St. Petersburg. “For instance, to construct a datacentre with a capability of 60 MW, discovering an acceptable web site can take as much as three years,” says Solyev. “In Moscow, in response to preliminary estimates, there are about 50 MW of free capability left, which is equal to 2-4 giant business datacentres.”
Solyev continues: “The capability deficit solely within the southern a part of the Moscow and Moscow area is predicted at 564 MW by 2030, and as much as 3.15 GW by 2042.”
Because of this, datacentre operators and buyers at the moment are searching for appropriate places outdoors of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and looking for to co-locate new datacentres in shut proximity to renewable vitality sources.
And this can be necessary as demand for datacentre capability in Russia is predicted to extend, as it’s in many of the remainder of the world, because of the rising use of synthetic intelligence (AI) instruments and companies.
The energy-intensive nature of AI workloads will put additional strain on operators which are already struggling to satisfy the compute capability calls for of their prospects.
Fixing vitality consumption ‘not simple’
Talking on the latest Ural Discussion board on “Cybersecurity in Finance”, Alexander Kraynov, director of AI know-how improvement at Yandex, says fixing the vitality consumption difficulty of AI datacentres is not going to be simple.
“The world is working out of electrical energy, together with for AI, whereas the identical scenario is noticed in Russia. With a purpose to guarantee a steady vitality provide of a newly constructed giant information middle we are going to want as much as 1 yr,” he says.
In line with a latest report of the Russian Vedomosti enterprise paper, as of April 2024, Russian information facilities have used about 2.6 GW, which is equal to about 1% of the put in capability of the Unified Power System (UES) of Russia.
Accommodating AI workloads will even imply operators might want to buy extra tools, together with costly accelerators primarily based on graphic processing items and higher-performing information storage techniques.
The implementation of those plans and the viability of those purchases is more likely to be critically sophisticated by the present sanctions regime towards Russia.
That mentioned, Russia’s prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, claims this a part of the datacentre provide equation is being partially solved by an uptick within the home manufacturing of datacentre equipment.
In line with the Mishustin, greater than half of the server tools and industrial storage and knowledge processing techniques wanted for datacentres are already being produced in Russia – and these figures will proceed to develop.
Authorities help for datacentres
The federal government additionally plans to supply extra monetary help to the business, as – to-date – constructing datacentres in Russia has been prevented by comparatively lengthy payback durations, of as much as 10 years in some circumstances, of such tasks.
One of many doable help measures on supply may embrace the subsidisation of at the very least a part of the rates of interest on loans to datacentre builders and operators.
On the similar time, although, the federal government’s actions in different areas have made it more durable for operators to construct new services.
For instance, in March 2025, the Russian authorities considerably tightened the prevailing norms for the institution of recent datacentres within the type of new guidelines for the design of information processing facilities, which got here into drive after the approval by the Russian Ministry of Development.
In line with Nikita Tsaplin, CEO of Russian internet hosting supplier RUVDS, the brand new guidelines led to extra forms within the sector (because of the positioning of datacentres as typical development objects).
And, in response to his predictions, that scenario can lengthen the development cycle of a datacentre from round 5 years to seven years.
The federal government’s intervention right here was to stop the set up of servers inside residential areas, akin to garages, but it surely appears set to complicate an already advanced scenario – prompting questions on whether or not Russia’s datacentre market will ever attain its full potential.
